


a shrike to your sharp and glorious thorn

by theexistentiallyqueer



Category: Persona 5
Genre: Akechi Goro Lives, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Depression, M/M, Multi, Suicidal Ideation, akira is a bi disaster, goro is emotionally constipated and incredibly repressed, honestly so does akira, i'll update tags as needed, no beta we die like kunikazu okumura, references to books i've never read, slowburn, so much gay pining, the alternate title of this is ''goro has depression''
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2020-06-29
Packaged: 2020-07-23 10:02:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 31
Words: 72,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20006485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theexistentiallyqueer/pseuds/theexistentiallyqueer
Summary: No one died in the bowels of Shido's palace; the Phantom Thieves, plus one, took down the ship's captain, the complacent public, the Demiurge itself.But for the conspiracy to be dismantled, someone had to take the fall.Goro spent three years in juvenile hall, unmoored and deserted on a metaphorical island with no ship in sight. He never planned for a future beyond ruining the man who ruined him.(The funny thing about futures is that they have their own way of finding you.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to the person who made the Hozier song lyric generator, and the other person who recc'd it on Tumblr for coming up with fic titles.
> 
> You can find me on Tumblr @theexistentiallyqueer.

_Juvenile hall was easier than this._

_Juvenile hall was coasting on open air._

_Here, the Phantom Thieves fill up his space. They come, in twos and threes, acting out the role of partnership. Behaving as if they have a bond._

_Goro weighs out their baggage, counts out their change, and faces them with the indifference of a stranger._

_They try to smile back and their smiles falter._

_He never asked for this._

* * *

It was Sae who brought it up first.

"You asked me to stay quiet about your early release, so I did," she tells him over one of their little lunches. She has a folio in her hand that she's just closed, papers pressed like fresh linens, not a wrinkle in sight. A hero on lunch break off to save the victims of the state's misdirected and perverted justice.

"And you've been quite accommodating," he says pleasantly before he tears a bite out of a sandwich that tastes like cardboard. (What doesn't? What has taste? He stopped cataloging the sensation of taste long ago. It certainly made food in juvenile hall that much easier to swallow.)

"I gave you your space," she agrees, and he can see the line she draws in the air as if with a knife, "but I think it's been enough. They're asking about you. They deserve to know, and I think you need it."

He brings the sandwich to his mouth and digs his teeth into it, tears out a vicious chunk; the lettuce and ham weep at the violence. Goro chews, and swallows, and exhales with force when he's done.

"It's your prerogative," he tells her, because he has no choice in this situation. He never had any choice, ever.

She looks at him with something like pity, something that makes his ire rise. Which is ironic, because she toes the line anyway. She keeps her first word.

"Have you looked over the list of potential employers I gave you?" she asks, and Goro breathes out at the change in topic. "I know part-time work isn't particularly glamorous or appealing, but your parole relies on certain conditions, and the trial funds can't support you forever."

"I've been looking over it," he tells her. "I'll give you an answer by Sunday."

They spend the rest of lunch in silence.

* * *

Getting out of juvenile hall turned out to be easy, once you knew the rules.

Rule number one: be invisible. That's fine--Goro learned long ago how to make sure no one noticed him. When the older children looked for someone to bully or to blame, they never saw him. When the adults looked for a child to castigate, he was the fly on the wall. 

Rule number two: be the perfect victim. If you're caught, be the one with the tragic backstory; be the one they can't hurt without recrimination. Armor yourself in your own suffering and use it to make sure when they hurt someone, whoever it is, it's not you.

Rule number three: when they come for you--because they will eventually, you still belong to the system--you find someone weaker and more pitiable, after all is said and done, to take your place.

There are other boys in juvenile hall for petty crimes--larceny, "arson" that's just burning newspaper in back alleys, self-defense dressed up as aggravated assault.

There are other boys who deserve to be there and other boys who don't.

Goro knows how to out-survive them all. He has a bail bond, and a defense lawyer, and a so-called resource network.

And if all of that fails and the system claims him for life, that's the funniest joke of all, isn't it?

* * *

His interview is perfunctory and a matter of formality; Sae knows the owner, Sae vouched for him, and the owner is sympathetic.

Sympathetic or pitying. The former is always preferable, but Goro doesn't care either way.

He wears the only slacks he owns now, paired with a button-down shirt with a plain black tie. A hollow echo of the costume he used to armor himself in when he was the celebrated detective prince.

The proprietress is a hunched-over elderly woman well past the recommended age of retirement. She smiles at him with her whole face when he walks in, which is both ugly and unnecessary. This whole performance is a farce; she already made her decision to pardon the transgressor when Sae first called her. 

He bows and says, in his most blandly polite voice, "Thank you for your offer."

"Goro-chan, right?" she says. Goro's stomach roils at the overly-familiar diminutive address. "Sae-chan's father helped my husband and I out when our son died, so when she called, I was happy to help. She says you're a smart boy."

He straightens his back, fixes his collar, straightens his tie. Wishes he was wearing gloves. He hasn't worn them in three years, and it constantly makes him feel too exposed.

"I'm fairly well-read," he replies, because he doesn't know what else to say.

She beams at him through her wrinkles. "That's good to hear. Managing this place by myself has been hard. I thought about closing the store after my husband died, but, well...this was our dream. It will be good to have someone young to help."

She leans on her cane and shuffles around the counter to take his hand and place a worn key in it. Her fingers brush his palm softly; he can't help it, he flinches away. She blinks up at him owlishly, then smiles.

"Sometimes it's just like that," she says, reaching up as if to pat his cheek before pulling her hand away without touching him.

* * *

Working at the store is--fine. It's fine. It's a thing to do, mindless chores and acts of repetition. It's disorganized and cluttered; he sets himself to sorting the books by category, by topic, by author's last name. He's vaguely aware that there are library systems for classifying knowledge but doesn't know them, so he uses his own patterns that he used for most of his life. 

The books are soft and cool, pages worn, and comforting to the touch. Books are a thing he'd never worn gloves to handle, before. They don't spark and burn against his skin.

Everything in juvenile hall had blistered to the touch, too nostalgic in a painful way because they felt like the group homes. Institutional, indifferent, and cold.

It's far from full-time, gainful employment. Most of his shifts are at night, none lasting more than six hours. But whenever he's with the old woman, she praises his hard work, his industry, how he's organized the cluttered little store. It's--

Cloying.

He prefers the evenings, after she's left. Hardly anyone comes in then, and if they do he leaves them to their own devices, absorbing the quiet until they get the message and leave. 

* * *

Sae doesn't need to set traps; Sae is a trap in and of herself. He goes to their regularly scheduled luncheons with the expectation that she'll have dug up more ammunition to wield against him.

"Have you been looking at colleges?" she asks, and Goro ticks off a mental point for her on his internal scoreboard.

The chicken he's eating tastes like notebook paper, which is at least a subtle contrast against the taste of cardboard. He swallows his bite and wipes at his mouth, wipes the grease from his fingers. "You gave me quite a list."

"I found a surprising number of universities willing to accept students with a criminal background," she says, straight-laced and straight-lipped. She can tell he's trying to deflect.

Sae looks at him, and Goro knows she knows. This post-change-of-heart, Metaverse-aware Sae is much less susceptible to his particular brand of bullshit.

He looks away. "I'll go over them again tomorrow," he tells her, taking another bite of his meal.

They make small talk. Goro goes back to his apartment and goes to sleep.

* * *

He doesn't go over Sae's list of universities-that-accept-convicted-criminals the next day. He goes to Tokyo Tower instead, which is a senseless waste of money he doesn't have, but he doesn't care. He takes the elevator up to the observation deck and looks out over the meaningless sprawl of skyscrapers, high-rises, office buildings, houses, and he contemplates emptiness.

Most people go into life with a plan. Get rich, or die trying. Find the right man, the right woman, whatever, or die trying. Goro had a plan: kill your way to the top, get your piece of shit father to acknowledge you, then drag him down into the gutters. His plan didn't work out that way. His backup plan, to die trying, didn't work either: he can thank Haru Okumura and the frankly ridiculous size of her persona's guns for that.

He gave up his life and his future and everything in it and whatever to the fucking Phantom Thieves, and he doesn't know what the fuck ever he has left to cling to as a way forward. Juvenile hall doesn't teach troubled children how to find a place in life; it sucks them in and spits them back out, complacent in the belief that the delinquents within its walls have gone too far to amount to anything.

He can't look at Sae's stupid list of universities. To look at that kind of list, you have to know what you want for yourself. You have to believe in some kind of future.

Goro just wants to know if he'll wake up in the morning and if there will be a meal in the evening; he's not even sure he particularly cares if either condition is met.

The sky is so blue it's blinding. He wants to shut the colors off, turn on the night and make the lights go away. It's too bright, but he can't stop looking. The blue fades into orange, to pink, to purple. Closing time is coming. Goro knows he should leave. Should go back to his apartment and face tomorrow.

Eventually, because he has no other option, he does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll be real with you: I don't know exactly where I'm going for this. This was largely born of a headcanon of how the Phantom Thieves could have saved Goro, but I found myself less interested in writing the actual event and more interested in what life for him would be like after the story concluded. It's resulted in a Goro who's not in a good place: he's in a hole he dug for himself.
> 
> I have bits and pieces of ideas, and I'm going to try to stick with this, but updates might be slow.
> 
> Writing for this fandom is hard for me for some reason. Maybe it's just because I've read way too many amazing fics by too many much better writers already.
> 
> Yes, the proprietress of the bookstore is Michiko from the Hierophant link in Persona 3. No, I don't care that Iwatodai isn't Tokyo because it's a made-up city. Yes, she should probably be dead by now given how old she looks in P3, but I found the idea of introducing her in Goro's life too interesting to resist. She's a tough old lady.
> 
> And yeah: the alternate title is literally "Goro has depression," because hoo boy does he.


	2. Chapter 2

Elderly Ms Kitamura is shuffling through papers behind the counter when she interrupts Goro's mission to re-alphabetize his current stack of molding books by asking, "What do you like to read, Goro-chan?"

Last night, bored and still refusing to look at Sae's stupid list, he'd googled the Japanese Decimal Classification system, and he thinks he has a working understanding of it now. Where once his literary fare was comprised of dead white men with too much time on their hands, now he reads Japanese Wikipedia to stave off the mind-numbing boredom of his self-imposed isolation; occasionally, when he wants a challenge, he'll switch the site to English and see how far he can get before he needs to google a word.

"Murder mysteries," he answers by rote. He can't even remember the last one he read, lack of volition not withstanding. _The Expendable Man_? _Those Bones Are Not My Child_? _The Silent Dead_? Everything in juvenile hall had been so sickeningly _wholesome_.

Kitamura huffs what might be a chuckle. "So you like the darker stories, do you?"

Goro picks up one of the books and slots it between two others on a shelf, lines the spines up flush against the edge of the wood. He's not invested in this conversation, in this old woman's attempts to pry into him like a puzzle. He's operating on auto-pilot, which is, he tells himself, the only reason he's indulging in her attempts at conversation at all.

"I think that the authors of those books dealing in darker, more mature themes have a better grasp of human nature than those who write fantasies," he says, something dark curling around his tongue.

He used a quasi-mystical manifestation of humanity's subconscious to murder people. The irony isn't lost on him.

Kitamura makes that ugly expression where the wrinkles press together around her eyes, around the corners of her mouth, a sad half-smile. "I see," she says, and he can hear her generous pity.

* * *

"Oh," someone says in surprise; Goro recognizes the voice and knows his day is over. He should have expected this. He can resort to patronizing the cheapest coffee shops in Shibuya he can find, but in the end it's still Shibuya; they're bound to cross paths eventually.

He plasters on the most careful very-much-not-smile and turns to face Haru Okumura.

Having acknowledged him and been acknowledged in turn, she can't politely ignore him, genuinely well-mannered as she is. That was something that had always grated him: how sincerely she played the role of the well-bred rich man's daughter, up to and including needing a prince to save her. How trite of her.

She meets his eyes then looks away, tugging at a curl before clasping her hands in front of her and studying them like she's just had a manicure and wants to make sure there are no rough edges. She probably has.

"It's...been a while," she ventures, her voice squeaking on every syllable. She's dressed in an overly-frilly confection that likely costs more than a minimum wage worker makes in a week.

"Three years, to be precise," Goro says, just to drive the knife in a little bit further. She hadn't been there the day of his sentencing; he knows why and holds it against her anyway, even as he tells himself he doesn't care.

Pink dusts her cheeks in a delicate, maidenly blush. She squeezes her hands together, seems to steel herself in her heart of heart of hearts, and meets his eye again.

"I won't apologize for that," she says. There's a layer of intention and self-confidence to her voice she never had three years ago, a newly orphaned child trying to assert control over her life in a world of adult men.

Goro learned to do that when he was ten. "I understand your reasons," he tells her in his best television voice, mild-mannered and perfectly tailored to incite an argument.

Her cheeks flare red. "I always felt--" she starts to say, her voice quiet and forceful.

At the counter, one of the clerks lifts a hand. "Next customer, please!"

Goro smiles thinly. "This is me," he tells her, and walks away.

They don't speak again before he leaves.

* * *

Sae watches the juvenile delinquent across from her pick up the smallest portions from his bowl and lift them to his mouth like he's trying to deliberately underfeed himself.

Maybe he is; it's hard for Sae to tell. The mental map she used to read Goro Akechi expired three years ago, when all of his walls between himself and the world fell to pieces. He's not utterly without pretense now, even stripped of all his masks, but there's a brittleness to his edges he never used to show before, and the cracks have only widened during his years in the state's tender custody.

"I heard you ran into Haru," Sae says. Akechi doesn't so much as twitch at that, just lifts his head and angles his eyes so he can see her beneath his fringe, the expression in his eyes vaguely disinterested.

"Oh?" he says, taking a sip of his water and wiping at his mouth primly with a napkin.

"Makoto wasn't happy," she says, her voice level. Makoto had, in fact, been furious; the Haru Sae knows keeps her true feelings close to her chest, but Makoto is one of the few people she confides those in, and Makoto in turn acts like she's the wall between Haru and the world.

Akechi has one of those half-smiles that doesn't quite reach his eyes, the kind that's too-sharp, false and knife-edged. "I'm sorry to hear that."

Sae looks away, presses her thumb to her lips and imagines herself as a general with a bird's-eye view of the battlefield.

"Akira moved back to Tokyo after high school," she says, shifting the topic abruptly. She doesn't turn to look at Akechi but rather looks down at her meal, plucks a flaky piece fish between her chopsticks and chews on it thoughtfully. After she swallows, she continues. "He moved back into the attic above Leblanc and he's been working there while he goes to college."

From the corner of her eye she can see something in Akechi shift, though his expression remains the same: vague smile, empty eyes, a sullen undercurrent flowing beneath. He hasn't even moved at all, his posture exact, but there's a faint thrum of energy she doesn't even think he's aware of.

"And what," he says, lifting his glass of water to his lips and smiling another smile that doesn't reach his eyes, "am I to do with that information?"

Sae presses thumb and forefinger to the bridge of her nose and suppresses a sigh.

* * *

He hates his empty apartment, furnished with only a futon and a _chabudai_ ; he can't stand his lunches with Sae, the air filled with meaningless conversation and misplaced concern. The bookstore is a trial, with Ms Kitamura's occasional attempts at conversation and the intrusion of customers who don't realize they are not wanted, but at least it gives him something to _do_.

He's a robot, a detached part of his mind reflects, still determined to analyze the world as if it's an insect pinned to a board beneath a too-large microscope. Like the automata of Okumura's palace, limbs moving in perfect, jerky rhythm, operating on the rules programmed into them. 

Today was his first time opening the shop; Kitamura had a doctor's appointment. She ambles in around one with a wrinkly smile, rubbing her back and commenting on her aches. Goro takes her jacket when she shrugs it off and hangs it up in the back.

"Has it been busy?" she asks, using her cane to shamble from the front of the counter to her chair behind it. She settles into it with the sigh of someone who's found the middle-ground of pain.

"Monstrously," Goro replies, by which he means not at all. It's early on a Tuesday, and her store's in an out-of-the-way alley in Jinbocho; what does she expect?

She makes a grunt of effort as she leans down, then lifts a bag onto the counter. "Can you put the rag away and come here? I have something for you."

Goro doesn't put his rag away; he tucks it into his belt, wiping his hands on his jeans. He hates the way the dust and grime feel on his hands and wishes desperately for his old gloves and their supple dark leather. He approaches the counter cautiously, expecting anything from a complimentary cookie from her breakfast buffet to a bomb.

It's neither. She pulls a package wrapped in a kerchief out of her bag and unties the knot holding it closed. The fabric falls away to reveal a sealed glass container with _kamameshi_ inside.

"I made too much last night," she says. "I'm still too used to cooking for two. So I thought, you're a growing boy, and you always come in with those convenience store _bento_. I would hate to waste it."

Goro feels a pit in his stomach drop. The air closes up around him. He forces out a thank-you and goes back to his dusting with his mind locked away in a very small room while Ms Kitamura wraps the container back up and returns it to its bag.

The weight of it drags on his arm as he carries it home.

* * *

In the bowels of Shido's palace, there's a bulkhead between him and escape, and a mass of shapeless shadows at his other side.

Facing him is another him, a shadow clad in stripes of blue and grey, a nightmare carnival puppet. It has a gun in its left hand, a well-oiled, beautiful antique piece that belongs in a glass case where it won't be used for murder.

"You'd really give it all up?" his doppelganger says with a derisive laugh. "The fortune, the glory, your footnote in history--you'd give it all up for a bunch of fucking wet-nosed brats?"

"Shut up," Goro hisses, trying to pull himself up straighter, taller, stronger, but for some reason everything seems too big, like some god picked him up and pinched him between its fingers, and that's almost funny because he knows the real god behind this game.

"Do you know what you would be without him?" the shadow whispers, and his voice sounds nothing like Goro's, it sounds like several voices speaking at once, all of the sounds coming from one throat. "You're gutter trash. It goes with the territory, I suppose, your mother being what she was, but you really take the fucking cake." Every one of its words is like a knife, needle-thin, slicing his skin from his chest and peeling it away to peer at the muscles beneath.

"SHUT _UP!_ " Goro screams, swinging the hissing blue ray of his saber out to slice the shadow in half. It dissolves into smoke, laughing, the vapors twisting around him like fog.

"What did you think--that you'd reveal everything to him, and he'd beg for your forgiveness?" the voice asks from behind him. It sounds different this time, pitched faintly higher, the cadence lilting. The words curl in his hair like a whisper. "Did you think that would make your mother's death okay? That his praise would lift you up and she'd be a sacrificial stepping-stone in your path to glory?"

His legs tremble beneath him; he struggles to push himself upright. His gun--not the real one, the stupid, childish prop that looks so much like the model he'd begged his mother for when he was a child--is holstered at his hip, and it fits in his hand like it was made for him. He pulls it from its holster and swings around, already aiming for his target.

The other him has pulled its helmet off. The face beneath it is familiar. Small nose, fine cheekbones. Hair too-long, flyaway strands of burnt caramel. But the eyes are a soft brown, fawn-colored, not red like maple leaves in the fall or dried blood.

He remembers the way she would tuck a loose strand behind her ear; how she would tuck the covers around him at night when she tucked him in.

"My poor, empty son," his mother tells him, her eyes weeping blood. "I failed you."

The earsplitting crack of gunfire is the last thing he hears. When he wakes, breath coming in stuttered gasps and wetness spilling down his cheeks, he buries his face into his pillow and screams.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Post-Goro Character Trailer Day!!!! This chapter was really hard to write but that trailer gave me extra motivation.
> 
> I hit a bit of a block writing this chapter and realized that I can't keep writing suicidally-depressed Goro. I can't make it interesting or engaging, and it's bad for my mental health. I'm going to start shaking up the POV with different characters going forward.
> 
> I haven't read any of the books Goro referenced (thanks Google). The last line his mother says to him in his nightmare is taken straight from a fictional novel in Tokyo Ghoul (Goro would absolutely read Eto's books).


	3. Chapter 3

Futaba sits at the bar, her legs curled up against her chest, arms wrapped around her ankles and her chin nestled between her knees. She looks like Morgana seated that way, if Morgana didn't have a spine that could rotate 180 degrees.

Speaking of the psychological Metaverse construct--Morgana hops up onto the bar and nuzzles his face against Futaba's, purring hard enough to run an airplane.

Akira sets a plate of curry, steaming and aromatic, on the counter and pushes it towards her. Futaba doesn't so much as look at it.

"It's just not _fair_ ," she complains through the hair falling over her face in a curtain. "I was supposed to have five more months to be ready. At _least_."

Morgana sets two paws on her knees and pushes himself up to nose her hair out of her eyes. "You don't have to see him. There's almost 14 million people in Tokyo. You'll probably never even run into him!"

"Haru did!"

Morgana deflates. "Well, true, but--" He perks back up. "Haru said that was in a coffee shop. How likely are you to get coffee anywhere that's not here?"

"Not likely," Futaba huffs, then startles up in a panic. "But what if he comes here? What if he walks through the door _right now_ , and I have to look at him and play it cool and try not to say, 'Hey, Akechi, how were the three years you spent in prison for crimes completely unrelated to the murders you totally did commit?'"

"He was in juvie," Akira corrects gently. "Not prison."

And it might seem stupid, but to him, who came so close, the distinction matters.

"Whatever!" Futaba says, "Whatever, _whatever_! What I'm saying is, I need more _time_. Why couldn't the gods of the criminal justice system have given me that? What am I supposed to _do_?"

Akira finishes drying a dish and pokes her in the forehead, smiling. "Just pretend you're Phoenix Ranger Feather Cuckoo Neo facing off against her arch-nemesis."

Futaba slaps her hands over her forehead, protecting it from further life-ending injury. "Feather Cuckoo Neo would pound the crap out of Lord Shantak!"

"Be Feather Cuckcoo Neo," he suggests again, picking up another dish to dry, "but less violently."

Futaba blows him a raspberry.

* * *

His last year of high school had been weird, back in the old school building in his hometown, with the paint peeling at the corners and the ceiling tiles crumbling because the prefecture hadn't increased the town's budget in the past ten years despite inflation making everything cost more. So long as the heating system wasn't leaking gas, so long as no one died.

He'd left a pariah, a petty criminal, the shame of the small town. He'd returned as some kind of cult celebrity because he'd spent the year in glamorous Tokyo, a coveted source of gossip. The buzz of the Phantom Thieves had spread outside the vast metropolitan area into the tiny countryside villages, and the bubble of excitement hadn't quite yet deflated. He was the closest thing they had to a second-hand source (and oh, the irony).

Akira ignored them all. He treated them with polite indifference, tilted his face exactly so that the light would angle off his glasses and hide his eyes, and answered their questions with non-answers until they stopped asking. Soon enough he was like he had been towards the end of his year at Shujin: invisible.

That suited him just fine.

He had meetings with his homeroom teacher, with the principal, one on one or with his parents in the mix. He sold them his plan, cobbled together from lies and half-truths and stitched together with duct tape, with the finesse of a con artist. Pass the entrance exams. Get into college. Major in something impressive-sounding (business, he decided on, because it kept his parents from frowning and making disapproving comments).

He didn't tell them he didn't believe in the future they all saw for him. He didn't tell them getting into a city college was his way out, not his way in. He couldn't tell them any of that, because any half-envisioned ideas he'd had of his future had been stamped out by the system when he'd been found guilty of trumped-up charges, and he'd tried to fix things the only way he could, and how he just wanted to be where he belonged, surrounded by people who were real.

_One year_ , he told himself, marking off the days on his calendar. _Ten months._ Then, _seven months_. Then, _three months_. Then, _just one more_. Time metered itself out in the quiet rhythm of small towns, bringing him closer and closer to returning _home_.

* * *

A wadded-up ball of paper hits Akira in the forehead--hits his hair over his forehead, bouncing off and falling sadly into the uncharted depths beneath the table.

"Are you listening to me, Akira?" Ann asks, grabbing for the wrapping paper from Ryuji's straw to prepare more ammunition.

They're at the Shibuya diner. They are, ostensibly, studying: Akira has an exam, Ryuji has to maintain a GPA above 50% to not lose his scholarship, and Yusuke has an end-of-term art project that involves (somehow) reading the biographies of at least seven long-dead painters. Ann, who's eschewed college in favor of periodic internships with business friends of her parents abroad, is there for moral support.

"How remarkable," Yusuke says, summoned by the power of subconscious telepathy. "The inspiration for Salvador Dali's most famous painting came from melted cheese. Inspiration truly lies in the most mundane of places."

"Dude," Ryuji says, looking up from his notebook. "When was the last time you slept?"

Yusuke contemplates this. "Two days ago," he answers, serious and unconcerned.

"Guys!" Ann exclaims, aiming her newest projectile at Ryuji. He yells when it hits him; one of the waitresses gives them a dirty look. "Did _anyone_ hear what I just said?"

"I heard," Akira offers, hoping to stave off further assault. He did hear, but he knows how Ann is and doesn't want to give her an excuse.

"Somethin' about Akechi being back, right?" Ryuji says, rubbing at his forehead and glowering. "Yeah, I heard you. So what?"

Ann puffs up her cheeks, grabs for a napkin. Akira hurries to grab every other napkin on the table, then the napkin dispenser itself just to be safe. "So, what are we going to do? We should have a welcome home party! But Sae won't tell us how to get a hold of him."

"And?" Ryuji says, tensing in the way that means he's ready to dodge any weapon Ann aims at him. "Who knows how long he's been back? He got out early and Makoto's sis didn't tell us. He's on like, parole and shit."

"Perhaps there was a legal reason we couldn't be told," Yusuke muses. "We are, none of us, experts in criminal law, after all. Prosecutor Niijima's judgment must be deferred to in such scenarios."

Akira looks away, tugging at a curl hanging over his eyes. He doesn't think any of them have it quite right. "Maybe he didn't want us to know."

Three sets of eyes swivel around to stare at him. Akira leans forward on his elbows and folds his hands together in the air. He remembers the days after his arrest, furiously cutting every person out of his life who used to matter. He'd done it because they'd proven themselves to be shallow people who didn't actually care enough about him to listen to his side of the story, the bitter anger tasting like vomit on his tongue.

And this is Akechi, who's lived that reality his entire life.

"He took the fall for us," he tells them, raising his head to look each of them in the eye, "so that we could take his father down. Then he spent three years in juvie, and they wouldn't let him talk to anyone except Sae. Maybe he thinks we just used him to make ends meet, and he's afraid even talking to us would confirm that as true."

Ryuji winces. "Oh," Ann says quietly. Yusuke studies the dried paint under his fingernails in solemn contemplation. Suddenly the air feels too heavy.

Ann is the first to rally herself, to perk up with a cheery smile and slam her palms down on the table hard enough to make the dishes rattle. "If that's all it is," she says, "we'll just have to prove him wrong!"

Akira looks at his friends and smiles.

* * *

The evening is quiet. When the last customers leave, Akira cleans up the way Sojiro first taught him, sixteen and in angry exile. The machines are spotless, the counter shining. He hangs up his apron, turns off the lights, and heads upstairs.

The attic is different than it was when he first moved into it. It has an actual bed now (Sojiro bought it when Akira moved back for college, apologizing for making him sleep on a futon laid out over crates). Akira bought himself a dresser in lieu of having a closet, upgraded the storage shelves to actual bookshelves, and exchanged his CRT TV for a small, inexpensive flatscreen Futaba gave him as a Christmas-slash-early-birthday-slash-late-welcome-home present. He's managed to accumulate more curios, gifts from his friends and acquaintances that take up more space on his bookshelves than actual books.

There's a Phantom Thieves banner hanging over his bed. He'd bought it on closeout after the Phantom Thieves craze had died out, because every time he looks at it, it reminds him of a year when he was in high school and everything he did mattered.

"How was work?" Morgana asks, stretching up onto his paws from where he'd been curled on the bed, napping.

Akira pads over to his bed and flops down on his back to stare at the ceiling. Morgana, after scrambling out of the way, crawls onto Akira's chest to stare down at him. "Rent was rent," Akira says.

Morgana's nose wrinkles. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Akira scratches behind Morgana's ears; Morgana chest rumbles in a purr. "Just another day of the same."

After a moment Morgana fights himself free and moves to Akira's side to clean himself. "Have you figured out what to do about the Akechi situation?"

He hasn't. Makoto can't get anything out of Sae ("She said that she's respecting his wishes, even if she disagrees with them," Makoto said the last time he asked), leaving them at square one. Akechi is officially disgraced in law enforcement, so staking out police precincts isn't an option. He's been considering talking to Iwai or Ohya, though he doubts even their connections could do much at this point. After the trial, after the Phantom Thieves craze died, Akechi essentially became a public non-entity.

It's all starting to feel kind of like stalking, even if it's for a good reason.

And there's still Futaba and Haru, who are--not fragile, exactly, but--sensitive. He knows they're sympathetic, and he also knows it's hard for them.

But Ann's right--( _Ann's usually right_ )--they can't just leave it alone.

Akira rests an arm over his face and closes his eyes. "Tomorrow's a Saturday. I have Crossroads tomorrow night," he says. "Maybe Lala can give some insight."

Morgana makes a dubious noise, but keeps his opinion to himself.

Akira falls asleep without changing into his PJs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Surprise! This update came really fast. I was like, "Hey, let's do Akira's POV," and then this entire chapter turned into Akira's POV. And then I realized Akira himself is kind of listless, but not in such a bad mental place. And then I realized I have a really good narrative thread to tie this story together. And then this entire chapter basically wrote itself.
> 
> I'm not confident in my writing of some of the Phantom Thieves, particularly Ryuji and Yusuke, so please critique me if you feel I need it!!! Also fuck Ryuji getting a scholarship in Royal apparently being part of some dream sequence. Give Ryuji a scholarship in canon. Let Ryuji be an Olympic athlete and win so many gold medals Kamoshida chokes on them.
> 
> If Lala isn't a confidant in P5R, I will riot. Lala is amazing. How does Atlus not realizing how amazing she is? Give us her story!!!!


	4. Chapter 4

"Hey, Lala-san," Akira says as he wipes out the inside of a glass and sets it to the side so he can grab another. "How do you find someone who doesn't want to be found?"

It's the kind of question he would normally ask Sojiro, if Sojiro wasn't so involved in the situation. If Sojiro wouldn't look at him with his fingers twitching for a cigarette and say this is one situation he hasn't got a clue.

Akira shuffled the last drunk out of the bar and locked the door half an hour ago, and they're hitting the tail end of the night. Lala is counting out the cash and adding up her totals for the day, and she doesn't look away from her tiny battered notepad long-ago stained with a drunk customer's spilled beer.

"Depends on why they want to hide," she replies, tapping the end of her pen thoughtfully against her mouth. She's wearing a dark green kimono tonight, and her lipstick and eye shadow are butterfly-purple.

Akira lifts one shoulder in a shrug. He's gone back and forth with this very question with Morgana, with Ryuji and Ann. "If I had to guess..."

"Go on," Lala encourages. "What's your guess?"

He remembers the cold, haughty look on Akechi's face as they'd watched Shido's press conference from the safety of Leblanc, the cafe warm with the rich familiar smells of coffee and curry, and the way something in the set of his mouth had looked dissatisfied. He'd sat removed from the rest of their group, seated on a bar stool while the rest of them crowded together into the booths, all of them pressed against one another, elbows and knees knocking together. Akira remembers too the trial, how Akechi had only met his eyes once over the course of those long days, and his eyes had been cold and guarded, locking away whatever was inside of him like a shuttered house.

( _"I don't know what the fuck is_ wrong _with you!" He looked smaller somehow, hunched over on his knees on the top deck of the ship, the Diet building's long shadow devouring him. The striped patterns on his Metaverse costume made him look too-thin and stretched out in the dark. "Dragging me out of there with you, you think you're being righteous and making some kind of point--"_

_Futaba's hands were balled into fists as she slammed her foot on the metal floor, her small body vibrating with the full measure of all of her anger and heartbreak. "You were just trying to take the easy way out, like a coward! You don't get to_ do _that. Stand up and--and face it, and_ do _something about it!"_

_Akira looked at Haru. Haru just looked tired._

_He'd wished, at the time, that he had the words to fix everything, to make it all better. The right thing to say to temper Akechi's broken rage, to soothe Haru's and Futaba's yawning hurts. He'd looked at Ann, hoping for some clue to an answer, but she just looked back at him, as lost as he was._

_"Let's go home, guys," he'd said instead. He'd thought, at the time, that they had all the time in the world to figure it all out._ )

"He thinks I don't care," Akira says, rubbing the back of his neck as he blinks the neon glare from Lala's sign out of his eyes. _Welcome Love_. He's always liked it here, more than just about anywhere else except Leblanc. Maybe it says something about him, that bars--coffee, liquor, or otherwise--are the only places that have ever felt like home. "Probably he thinks I never did."

Lala pulls her cigar case out of her obi, takes a cigar from it and cuts the cap, then lights it and pinches it between her lips. She takes a thoughtful drag on it, breathing the smoke in deep before exhaling it through her nose. The smell of freshly burning tobacco fills the little area behind the bar. Pink and purple light filters through it, glittering off of the bottles of liquor; Lala's promised to show him how to mix drinks, come his birthday this fall.

"Sounds like a complicated situation. If he's that determined to stay away, you're going to have a hard time finding him. But," she adds, taking another drag from her cigar, "I can't say I've ever met another kid quite like you. I've seen your friends who come in here, Ichiko aside. It's like you're a magnet to them, or a small sun. I'm not usually one to say leave things to chance--you never get anywhere that way, in my opinion, not with the rest of the world so determined to tell you what to do and how to be--but with you..."

She trails off, turns to him and gives him one of her rare, genuine smiles. It makes the crows feet around the corners of her eyes crinkle up with shadows, makes her eyes shine.

"If it's you, kid, I think the best thing is to let fate take the reigns. Things'll fall into place." She picks up a crumpled napkin and throws it at him; he tries too late to duck, and it bounces off his shoulder to land on the floor. "Now get out of here. You may be in college now, but that doesn't mean you can slack off."

Akira smiles back when he says his goodnight.

* * *

Goro carries a small tote bag with him to work this time. When he enters the store, his eyes adjust to the dim light, the sunlight reflecting off the motes of dust floating in the air. It smells like books in here, old paper, leather, and the faintest sweet note of rot. He's getting used enough to the smell that it's starting to be something close to comfort, if not quite the thing exactly.

He dips his head in greeting to old Ms Kitamura as he approaches her, sets the bag on the counter in front of her before he steps into the back room to divest himself of his jacket. He can hear her faintly through the curtain that hides the back room from customers' prying eyes, pulling open the bag and lifting the glass container out.

He'd had to purchase dish soap on his way home the other night, when he realized he didn't actually have any. The kamameshi had been sweet with mirin and too heavy, and somehow he'd found himself eating every bite.

She gives him her ugly wrinkle-faced smile when he steps out of the back room, his sleeves folded up past his elbows; it's getting close to May, and the little store lacks an air conditioning unit.

They don't speak; he works on the books and she turns on the radio. The reedy, melancholic voice of an old enka singer drifts between the shelves. The smell of old books, the dust motes in the dim light, the supple give of aged leather under his palm: it feels like time is suspended here, in this place. He feels, strangely and with surprising vigor, the hum of a current running from the tips of his fingers, up his arms and into his shoulders, from there up his neck to tingle the back of his head. The weight of his feet on the floor, gravity defining his mass. Existing in the present.

"Do you like spring, Goro-chan?" Ms Kitamura asks. He almost hates her for it, for interrupting that strange moment, or rather--he almost feels like he should hate her for it, and strangely, he doesn't.

"I don't dislike it," he answers, picking up another book. It's a tattered copy of Sartre's _Being and Nothingness_ ; he'd read it once, years ago. The pages are flaking, the ink faded, the glue rotting; he sets it aside to put in Ms Kitamura's pile to review for disposal.

She hums a little along with the song before responding. "I love spring," she says. "My son had a persimmon tree planted at the school where he taught. It was always beautiful in spring, when the flowers opened."

_Wherever I live, a single flower_ , the woman on the radio croons in her trembling voice. _Wherever I live, we will fall some day_.

"I think he would have liked you," she says.

* * *

The only customer of that evening--and what distinguishes her as a customer instead of a _visitor_ is that she actually buys something--is a thin, willowy woman with a cloud of blonde hair wearing a skirt patterned with mandalas.

Goro writes her off as vacuous, watches from the corner of his eye in dispassionate curiosity as she scans through the newly-organized sections to find books on meditation, animism, crystal healing, astrology--garbage and pseudoscience. When she continues on to the other sections, he turns away.

She comes to the counter with two books pressed against her breast, smiling beatifically, and places them down. He looks over them as he rings them out: one is a book on business self-management, the other a text on psychology. He studies her under his eyelashes, the contradiction intriguing enough for his brain to want to muddle through it.

"I bet I don't look like the kind of person who would buy books like these," she says with a self-effacing laugh.

Goro doesn't tell her that she looks like the kind of person to spend ¥10000 on a shiny rock because someone told her it would make her bad dreams go away. "They must be very informative," he says instead.

"That's for sure!" she says, toying with the tuft of hair at the end of her braid. "When I first started reading stuff like this, it was like, 'hoo boy, I sure feel stupid'. It's gotten better now, but sometimes I still have to look up a word or ask someone to help stuff make sense."

Goro smiles stiffly, holding his hand out to place a handful of coins in her palm without touching her. "Your change," he says.

She smiles and presses her thumb into the reverse face of a ¥500 coin like it means something, her eyes fixing on him in a way that makes his skin crawl. It looks almost like concern. "This might be weird to ask, coming from a stranger, but...are you okay?"

"I'm fine, thank you." Goro smiles, brittle and plastic.

"If you say so. I just..." She bites her lip and looks away, her gaze losing focus as she considers something before turning back to him. "I have a kind of sixth sense for things. Your aura...it's pretty gray."

He manages a skeptical laugh. "My aura. I see."

"Look, it's not much," she says, pocketing her change and drawing a velvet bag from her pocket, "but I do this as a kind of pay-it-back, pay-it forward thing. Draw a card."

In her hands is a stack of cards, the back face patterned in intricate circular designs, wheels interlocking with wheels. Goro looks at it, then back up at her with an incredulity he can't conceal.

"Please?" she pleads. "Give it a shot. Just one card."

He just wants her to shut up; he just wants her to leave. He draws a card and flips it over to see the other side.

The image on the card's face is a man and a woman facing one another, a winged figure in the air between them. Behind the woman is a fruit-bearing tree, and behind the man, a tree on fire. At the bottom, in fine script, the words _The Lovers_ are written in English.

The customer smiles at him beatifically, as if this presents some sort of answer to a question no one asked. "The Lovers represents love and personal choice. You have an opportunity coming, and the promise of a deep connection. The Lovers is a sign to take a leap of faith."

* * *

After work, he stops at a convenience store to buy dinner. He's confident, with sinking dread, that whatever he eats, it will taste like dashi broth sweetened with mirin. He wonders what that says about him. He wonders what it says about him that he even has to ask.

As he's making his way to the counter with his pre-packaged meal, he passes a display of flower arrangements and finds himself stopping. He tries to remember what persimmon flowers look like, their color, their shape, their size. Has he ever seen a persimmon tree in bloom? If he did, he didn't pay it close enough attention to imprint it onto his memory. He thinks, inanely, if you like spring, that you must like flowers, right?

He's staring at a gathered bunch of peonies, their furled petals blushing and pink, when the automatic doors open and he hears voices from people talking just outside the doors. Goro bypasses the flowers, his momentary madness forgotten, and steps up to the counter to pay for his dinner. As he's pulling his card out of his wallet to pay, he feels hands slap down onto his shoulders.

"Whoa, hey!" the woman behind him says, and he recognizes the voice and realizes his world is ending. "No way! No way!"

Goro turns mechanically and forces on the most neutral expression he can drag up from the depths of himself.

Ann Takamaki backs off enough so that she can grab him by his shoulders again and physically shake him; his teeth clack together before he clenches them.

"Akira's gonna flip!" she exclaims, her hold on him bruising. "Everybody's gonna flip! I'm already flipping! Where have you been!"

Goro manages a thin smile and begins desperately plotting his escape.

* * *

Akira's working on model kit for Futaba--he's been assembling them for her for two years, since she realized that his hands are steadier than a surgeon's with a scalpel and it's a great way to avoid studying--when his phone goes off. He swears and sets the pieces he's holding aside.

Morgana, nosy as he ever is, jumps up onto Akira's desk when Akira picks up his phone to check it; Akira loves him unconditionally regardless. "What's it say?" Morgana asks, tail lashing in curiosity.

When Akira opens the text, it's from Ann, a selfie of her standing next to a very irritable Goro Akechi.

> **Ann:** guess who i ran into!!!!  
>  **Akira:** where was this?  
>  **Ann:** somewhere in chiyoda? i had a shoot in hibiya today  
>  **Ann:** my popularity's thru the roof rn and mika can SUCK IT  
>  **Akira:** focus please  
>  **Ann:** right, my bad.  
>  **Ann:** he wouldn't give me his # :(  
>  **Ann:** i tried like 5 times but he kept saying his battery was dead & he didn't have it memorized yet  
>  **Ann:** which is obviously a lie but short of stealing his phone  
>  **Ann:** which i did consider! in my defense  
>  **Akira:** did he seem okay?  
>  **Ann:** i mean  
>  **Ann:** define okay?  
>  **Ann:** he looked like he needed a months's worth of good sleep and a lot of curry  
>  **Akira:** thanks for letting me know

Akira swipes the app closed and sets his phone down. Morgana noses at it, tail curling around Akira's wrist; Akira catches it beneath his hand and holds it pinned to the desktop as Morgana tries to twitch it free.

"Lady Ann must have been tired," Morgana says, swiping at Akira's hand with needlepoint claws so that Akira jerks his hand away, freeing his tail. "I mean, she considered stealing his phone, but she didn't actually follow through? If it was chocolate, she _definitely_ would have followed through."

"Ann's more perceptive than everyone gives her credit for," Akira says, pulling off his glasses to rub at his eyes. He's been staring at the arcane instructions of a Gundam model kit for the last two hours, and his eyes are tired. "Especially where people are concerned. She always knows how hard she can push before it's too far."

"That's true," Morgana muses, turning in a circle before sitting, his tail curled elegantly around his body. "So what now?"

Akira thinks about what Lala said. Two accidental run-ins in the span of a couple of weeks isn't a bad track record, as far as luck is concerned. He smiles at Morgana and rubs between his ears. "I think Chihaya's playing our cards."

Morgana looks at him with dubious judgement written all over his small cat face but keeps whatever he's thinking to himself.

Akira picks up his phone again and opens the chat app to text Hifumi.

> **Akira:** Evening, General. Up for a campaign?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Haha! Did you think the Lovers card was supposed to represent Akira? Guess again!
> 
> The song playing on the Ms Kitamura's radio is "Woman's Blues" by Keiko Fuji. It's an enka classic. I took some liberties with Chihaya's abilities and leaned into vaguely-psychic territory. I hope her voice sounds okay! I rewatched her confidant to get her voice right, and I settled on trying to mix her sort of bland politeness when she's speaking Kansai-ben with how she sounds (in the English translation) when she breaks into her natural dialect.
> 
> I'm not SUPER confident with parts of this chapter, but I'm also not the type to stew in that and constantly try to rewrite a segment, because....I know my limit and my attention span. I'd rather post something that's flawed than let writer's block kill my joy in writing. If you feel something deserves feedback, please give it! I welcome it!


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to Krist for being my personal cheerleader while I write this. The measure of your support is unqualifiable. The way you respond so enthusiastically when I talk about any part of this endeavor, the way you encourage me and listen to my thoughts and give me your feedback and assuage my doubts, is the best support a writer can have.

"Our justice system is built to meet the needs of the worst of our culture," Sae said one night over dinner as they picked over the dry assertions in Makoto's textbooks, the rote lectures of her professors. "You know the prosecutor's fallacy, right?"

" _'The odds of finding this evidence on an innocent man are so small that the jury can safely disregard the possibility that this defendant is innocent'_ ," Makoto quoted. "But Japan doesn't use juries."

"Right. We have an inquisitorial system instead, with the judge deciding the rules--though prosecutors have a great deal of authority in deciding how, when, and whether to try a suspect. Now we have lay-judges, but the system functions much the same. Yet the prosecutor's fallacy still exists. Why?"

"Well," Makoto paused, setting her chopsticks aside so she could fold her hands and think. "A fallacy like that implies...a subconscious mental bias. If the prosecutor is removed from the equation but the bias still exists, that implies that the bias exists independent of the prosecutor."

"Which means," Sae summarized, "that the fallacy exists within society itself, based in nothing more than the assumption that standing out in any way makes you culpable."

"The presupposition of guilt," Makoto murmured. The same thing that made it so easy to convict a teenager on a trumped-up assault charge.

"Easier to return to the status quo," Sae said.

Makoto remembered what had lain in wait in the depths of Mementos, sucking the world dry of any shred of empathy it possessed, and shuddered.

* * *

_After their last fight, after the end of the end, Sae asks to speak with the three of them alone. Leblanc's tables are still littered with the detritus of the celebration._

_"I asked for Makoto to stay as a third party," Sae says. "I don't want to cause unnecessary friction in your group."_

_Makoto is seated across from Akira, who looks calm and neutral, not a shred of curiosity on his face. It infuriated Makoto when they first met, how dispossessed he seemed at all times, a person removed from the world. She knows him well enough now that she knows he wears twenty masks, and the only time she's seen through all of them to the real Akira has been in the Metaverse, raining calamity upon outmatched enemies._

_At the bar, Akechi sits in one of the high top chairs, physically removed. He's the opposite of Akira in this instance: unnervingly raw in the honesty of his body's language, the apathy written genuinely into his bones. When they'd dragged him out of Shido's cruise ship, he'd been a star in supernova; after they changed Shido's heart, he'd become sullen and dispassionate, a misanthropic singularity._

_"Given that we can't recover Wakaba Isshiki's research," Sae says, "building a case against Shido is more difficult than I'd anticipated. The very existence of the Metaverse itself is problematic."_

_She pauses at that, and Makoto can see where this is going. They all can see it, she's sure, every person in this room smart enough to see the white spaces between words._

_"You need a witness," Akira says, his grey eyes smoky with thought. "Someone who can corroborate the story. And if Makoto's a third party who's here to mediate the conversation, that means either me or Akechi needs to turn ourselves in."_

* * *

Makoto is engrossed in trying to parse the overly-complicated jargon of her law textbook when a knock on the door startles her out of her fitful attempt at concentration. She twists in her chair to see Haru poised with careless grace in the doorway, a kerchief-bundled package hanging from one hand and the other with knuckles resting softly against the wood of the door frame.

"Oh, no. What time is it?" Makoto says, stomach dropping as she checks her watch; the face reads a quarter to three. "I'm _so_ sorry! Did you try to call? Oh--I turned my phone off." She can feel her cheeks warming as she rushes to mark her spot in the book and pack up her things.

Haru giggles, the sound bell-like and clear. "It's okay. I was running a bit behind today, so this actually works out better for my schedule."

Makoto pushes her pile of study paraphernalia aside and grabs a nearby chair to pull it up to her desk so Haru can settle gently into it. She crosses her ankles and sets her package the desk to unwrap it, fine-boned fingers working deftly at the knot. When the fabric falls away, Haru pulls two glass containers out, setting one in front of Makoto and one in front of herself, before folding up the kerchief and setting it aside. Makoto works off the lid to reveal the contents: katsu sando, cut into threes, with karashi spread on the breaded pork for flavor. Haru likes her food spicy. Makoto has learned to acclimate.

This all started about two years ago, when Haru began taking cooking classes once a week. Ryuji and Yusuke would beg her to let them try her finished dishes, and Haru would plead inexperience and beg their pardon. Then one night Haru asked Makoto over for dinner, "Because," she said, "I don't think you'll spare my feelings, and you'll be honest even if it's uninspiring." And somehow, someway, that evolved into this new normal: Haru making time out of her schedule to visit her, Haru bringing her lunch made with the kind of ingredients Makoto wishes she and her sister could afford.

She knows the reasons Haru gave, but even now she still wants to ask, _Why me?_ At least nine other guys she has classes with have asked her to introduce them to her; Makoto has plead a busy schedule on every occasion.

"How is school going?" Haru asks, pulling a thermos out of her bag and sipping from it like it's fine china. 

"It's good," Makoto says, wiping her fingers on a napkin. One of her criminology classes this year has been interrogating the question of punishment: who decides it, how it's determined, and the extent to which that punishment meets the criteria of reformation in contrast to retribution. Sae has peppered Makoto's summaries of her lectures with reading recommendations of her own, fed by Sae's background as a prosecutor and her burgeoning career as a defense attorney.

One of the other criminology students she'd spoken with after class had talked about the presumption of guilt. "If they aren't guilty, why were they accused in the first place?" he'd argued. Makoto remembered meeting everyone in Leblanc for the first time after her sister's palace and seeing the bruises painting Akira's skin in blacks and purples.

Ann messaged the group chat yesterday to say that she ran into Akechi, and Akira followed up with half-formed plans and speculations on how to find him. Makoto hasn't been able to quite shake her outrage at what he said to Haru, even as that wars fundamentally with sympathy in her heart for someone she knows has been betrayed by the system.

Makoto watches Haru as she eats and wonders how she does it. Haru manages more compassion than anyone Makoto's ever met and balances it with her hurts regardless. The others sit and talk about making a place for Akechi, and Makoto agrees; the others sit and talk about making a place for Akechi, and Makoto wonders where the justice is.

If it had been Sae who was killed, Makoto thinks, she would have wanted whoever did it to suffer, no matter how much of a victim they also were.

Maybe she's stupid for believing she can fix the system from the inside out, but she has to try.

 _An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind_ , she tells the Anat that still exists within her heart even when all the magic is gone. _Sow peace into the earth instead_.

She doesn't think her father would believe paying for eyes with eyes would fix anything either.

* * *

Wandering Kanda aimlessly is something he can't do with anyone except Hifumi, who lives for aimless rambling. "Surveying the battlefield," she calls it, her hand curled softly against her chin as she studies Google maps and surveys the terrain. He picture her picturing it in her mind and laying out the pieces in anticipation of battle, anywhere at any time. She should play Starcraft with Futaba, probably. He knows she already plays Civilization, because she told him how she triggered the Gandhi bug. He makes a mental note to text Futaba later.

It's a shame Hifumi was never a Phantom Thief; she would have fit in perfectly.

They have to stop by Kanda Myoujin, because Hifumi is a sucker for underdogs and can't resist the opportunity to treat Akira a half-hour long discourse about long-dead generals. They only narrowly manage to avoid the imperial palace. She's majoring in history.

Akihabara is a new venue for Hifumi, introduced to her by Akira when she started getting into trading card games. She scorns Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! and considers Magic the Gathering a timeless masterpiece.

"Why did you ask me to come here with you?" she asks as they step out into the crowded streets where the sun shines down overhead, uncaring. "I know you aren't interested in the War of the Spark expansion."

Akira gives her a disarming smile. "I'm very interested in the struggle between Chandra Nalaar and Nicol Bolas."

"That's considerate of you," Hifumi says. "Let's go someplace less crowded."

They take the train to Jinbou and make their way from the by foot from the station down the narrow streets. He lets Hifumi lead the way; she has a store she wants to check out that one of the upperclassmen in her program recommended to her. They find it tucked away in a small corner, a far cry from Isseido or Shosen Grande. The only other person in the store is an elderly woman who smiles at them from her seat behind the counter when they walk in.

"Welcome," she tells them as the door swings shut behind them, the little bell overhead still chiming. "If you need anything, please let me know."

Hifumi gives her a small bow, and they wander through the shelves. The air is heavy with dust and silent wisdom. Akira runs a finger along the books' spines and pulls a copy of _Dark Star_ by Edogawa Ranpo off the shelf to flip through its pages.

"What's your goal?" Hifumi asks quietly as she's thumbing through an old book that is, judging from its title, a history of Houjou Tokimasa. From anyone else, the question would sound accusatory; from Hifumi, who regularly speaks with him as if they're discussing battle plans, it's natural.

Akira shrugs and smiles ruefully. "I was hoping to run into someone around here," he says. "An old friend."

"Ah," Hifumi says, closing the book with a finger between the pages to hold her place. "I see. Today was a scouting expedition."

"Something like that," Akira agrees. He tugs at one of the curls falling over his forehead. "I hoped you being here would be a lucky charm."

Her face flushes. "I'll throw this at you," she warns, hefting the book in her hand like it's a brick.

"My own personal goddess of victory," Akira says, and then sidesteps when she lunges at him. They scuffle shortly--he grabs the book out of her hand, and she steps of his foot; he rubs a hand over a dusty shelf and wipes it off on her hair, and she grabs one of his curls and yanks on it in retaliation.

Hifumi steps back after reclaiming her book, clutching it to her chest like a trophy, pink still high in her cheeks. "The next time you say that, I will summon a golden dragon from heaven and have it unleash its ultimate move, the Golden Dragon Ultimate Ruin Claw, to wipe you off the map."

When they go up to the register to ring out, the little old woman at the counter picks up each book like it's a treasure. Akira can see a story there, in the way her hands move over beaten leather and worn linen. She has an old-fashioned cash till in place of the fancy modern POS system he remembers from the convenience store, the flower shop. She has to punch the prices in by hand, and he has no doubt that any inventory she has is written out in an old ledger or only in her head.

"It's good to have young people in here," she tells them after she hands Hifumi her bag. The wrinkles in her face crinkle together when she smiles, each line mapping out a life story. "You make this place lively. Come back any time."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If the Hifumi scene feels like a let-down after the last-minute build up last chapter, that's because when I was writing this chapter, I changed what that scene was going to be. You can guess (probably correctly) what was supposed to happen.
> 
> I forgot to mention in the notes last chapter that I spent about three hours trying to figure out what Akira's birthday is just so I could decide on when Lala was going to teach him how to mix drinks. I decided that he's a Libra. I haven't settled on the date yet.
> 
> Reading about the Japanese criminal justice system is wild. Also reading about Anat was fucking wild too. The bit about sowing peace into the earth comes from the Epic of Ba'al invocation:
> 
> _Remove from the earth war_   
>  _Set in the dust love_   
>  _Pour peace amidst the earth_   
>  _Tranquility amidst the fields_
> 
> Edogawa Ranpo was the author of the Kogoro Akechi detective novel series. Kogoro Akechi's arch-nemesis was the Demon of Twenty Faces.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I totally forgot when I posted the last chapter that I wanted to say:
> 
> This is now technically a Hugo-Award-winning fic. Congratulations, me.

Juvenile hall was like the group homes, in that the only thing the boys there believed in was the absence of their futures.

Goro wasn't any different in that respect. Before Loki's voice first whispered in his mind, before he'd felt power for the first time in his life, all he ever did was try to stand out in the hopes that someone would look at him. He'd ultimately succeeded in the most catastrophic way imaginable, and it didn't matter at all, because he'd had no future before that and he still had no future after.

What set him apart from his fellow detainees was that the sentence he was serving was lenient in comparison to his real crimes.

He had a roof over his head, a bed to sleep in, three square meals a day. He hadn't bled out in the belly of the metaphysical manifestation of his son of a bitch father's mind. He was, to some relatively minuscule degree, serving penance for the blood on his hands. All told, relative to others the twist in his fate wasn't so bad.

At night, asleep in his cell, he dreamed he was floating in in a black ocean under a night sky, all the bodies he'd put into the ground floating around him, their blood seeping into the water. There were sharks in the depths, he knew, and they were hungry.

* * *

"Hey again!" the blonde woman from the other day says when she steps through the door. Her braid hangs heavy over her shoulder, and her skirt today is patterned in _triquetra_. She has a cloth bag hanging from her shoulder, swinging gently with her movements.

"Good afternoon," Goro says politely before returning to his crossword. _Thirteen down, River of Hades, four letters._ He writes _Styx_ in careful English.

"Oh, hello," Ms Kitamura says as she shuffles out of the back room, leaning on her cane. Goro moves to pull her chair out for her, but she passes him by to approach the woman. "It's good to have a new guest. You're very welcome here."

The blonde woman laughs airily. "It's technically my second time, but thank you!"

"Please let me or my boy know if you need anything," Ms Kitamura says. When did he become _her boy_? "Goro-chan, which one are you on now?"

"Eighty across. _Earth, to Walt Whitman_. Three letters."

"I've never read him. I don't think I've read many English writers."

"He was American," Goro says, writing in the word _orb_. "Shirley Jackson is good, if you're looking for fiction. Nathaniel Hawthorne as well." He read _We Have Always Lived in the Castle_ when he was thirteen, and _The House of the Seven Gables_ not long after.

"Maybe I should expand my horizons," Ms Kitamura says, shuffling back behind the counter so Goro can help her into her chair. "If you recommend a book for me to read, I'll recommend one for you."

" _The House of Leaves_ ," Goro says automatically just to be perverse, and then feels guilt eating at him once the words are out of his mouth.

She gives him her wrinkled smile. " _Kafka on the Shore_ ," she says back right away, surprising him. He's read some Murakami-- _Sputnik Sweetheart_ and _1Q84_ \--but not the title Ms Kitamura mentioned. He'd expected something older from her; _The Setting Sun_ , perhaps, or _The Wild Geese_. He has no basis for his supposition, but he can see her reading Yaeko Nogami.

The blonde woman comes up to the counter to ring out; Ms Kitamura takes charge, as she does when she's in the shop. She likes helping people, he's noticed, likes being a random force of decency in the world. Goro, who has never felt the hand of that sort of thoughtless kindness touch his shoulder in benediction, can't understand the impulse that drives her.

_(Maybe he has experienced it, that kindness. On quiet afternoons in the warm heart of a coffee shop, Sojiro Sakura's company gruff and indifferent. A hot cup of coffee in front of him, made just to his tastes, hot enough to scald only if he was there for anything but to while the time away. And then some days, the door would open with chiming bells, and a presence with the gravity of a small sun would step through._ A home, _Goro would think before opening his mouth to say--)_

"Thanks for everything," the blonde woman says after she tucks her wallet away. "This place is a small gem, you know? I'm so happy I found it."

"We're very happy you found us," Ms Kitamura says, looping Goro into her generosity. "Come visit us any time. What's your name, dear?"

"Mifune," the woman says, pressing her hands together and bowing. "Chihaya Mifune."

"Chihaya-chan," Ms Kitamura says, wrinkling her face up in a smile. "Come back soon."

* * *

_Kafka on the Shore_ is tedious. Goro hates the protagonist, his milk-thin defiance of his father, the muddling plot. It's all convoluted and drowned in metaphor and symbolism. What is the fascination writers have with incest? It speaks to something pathological within the collective creative mind of society.

He doesn't look in the mirror and think, _Crowboy_. His reflection doesn't look back at him, raven-winged and needle-beaked, and say, _You have to become stronger_.

It's a terrible novel that can't stand for itself on its own merits, and he tells Ms Kitarmura so in the gentlest way he can.

"You think so?" she says, rubbing her chin. "I see some of your points, but I think what it's trying to say is that if we don't have something to live for, life is empty, and that's beautiful in its way. I felt that way when my son died. Then we opened the shop, and I had something to live for."

Goro thinks of his high school entrance exams, of struggling to get the top score so he could get into a decent high school on scholarship with no plan for what came after, because all he wanted was someone to see him. That was nothing to live for then. It's still nothing to live for now.

"Sometimes people get by without having anything that matters," he says.

Ms Kitamura hums. "Maybe they do. I knew a boy once.... But that aside, I think we'll close up early today. I just bought fresh salmon this morning and I'm making _yakizakana_ tonight. Come eat with me."

He protests, he tries to refuse, and in the end they lock up and he finds himself following her home.

The _yakizakana_ is delicious.

* * *

Before his next appointment with Sae, he buys himself a pair of gloves. They're cheap and made of pleather; they make his palms sweat when he wears them, but he doesn't care. Finally, a physical barrier between him and the world.

At lunch the next day Sae asks him how he's been, how work is, has he looked at schools. Goro responds by rote until she gets to the last question, and when she gets there, he sets his chopsticks down.

He wants to tell Sae a million things. He wants to tell her no. He wants to invite her to sit in and interview every boy he ever shared a roommate with, in the group homes or juvenile hall. She's so invested in giving him a future without seeing he never saw one for himself to begin with.

"Have you considered," he asks her, "that I haven't looked at your schools because I never looked past the age of eighteen?"

Sae pauses. Sae takes a sip of her water and looks him in the eye. He can feel her thoughts, feel the way she thinks at him, _Go on, then_ , the way she waits with patient, captive breath for his answer. A penitent liberator, a former jailer, only defying the system when it's too late. He wants to ask her where her newfound sense of justice was when she let him confess to crimes he didn't commit to put Shido away.

"Have you considered," Goro continues with her unasked-for approval to speak, "that I, like virtually every other person raised in the actual joke that is our federal childcare system, have never had a vision of the future? What would I go to college for? I suppose a degree would be great. I could become a salaryman and die from overwork, and I'm sure the funeral would be very touching with the zero attendants who come."

To her credit, Sae doesn't look distressed or overwhelmed with pity. "I've tried to get you to speak up and I've tried to give you space," she says, her voice measured, "and this is the most honest you've been in...years, if I'm being honest. If my pressuring you to find a school is having a negative impact on your ability to move forward, I can adjust and work with you. But you need to start being more honest with me about things. Let's start with what you actually do want."

Goro sees her in clean lines, drawn by a painter to catch the shape of her face and her body, the flyaway wisps of her hair forced down into something manageable and controlled. When he thinks of Sae, _control_ is the first word to roll off his tongue.

He lifts his hands to rub at his eyes, finds them moving from there to the back of his head, fingers digging into his neck. "I don't _fucking_ know," he tells her, his voice breaking over the words.

A touch at his cheek, the tiniest contact before Sae pulls her hand away.

"Take your time," she says, folding her napkin up into _sonobe_ shape. She holds it out to him as an offering; Goro takes it, his hand shaking. "We'll figure it out."

On his way home, he buys a coffee from a cheap cafe at the station. He doesn't drink it and sets it on the counter when he returns. The smell permeates the small apartment; he falls asleep to it, the lazy afternoon sunlight falling through his window.

He'll have to eat dinner when he wakes up. There's leftover salmon in the fridge.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Surprise next-day update!!! I started writing this chapter tonight and then it just fucking wrote itself, god bless. I hope that me littering bits about what makes this AU an AU (e.g., what actually happened that resulted in Goro surviving) works in a way that feels natural for you guys. Michiko is an Absolute Grandma.
> 
> The only book I mentioned in this chapter that I've actually read is _We've Always Lived In the Castle_ (which is amazing and if you haven't read it you should!!!!). I spent a lot of time googling. I have not read _Kafka on the Shore_ but I was fucking DYING to use it from the moment I started writing this once I discovered Crowboy.
> 
> The Sae scene was like...really not how I planned the Sae scene. And then it happened that way. And I kind of don't care if it seems OOC, bc Goro needs to break down a bit and be honest with somebody in his life, and frankly he should be honest with Sae in particular.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I updated the whole work summary! Mostly because I hated it. I think what it is now fits Shrike better, because this isn't intended to be a strictly Goro-centered fic. I intend to (and have been laying the groundwork to) give Futaba and Haru prominent voices as well.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel wrote, _“The state of man's mind, or the elementary phase of mind which he so far possesses, conforms precisely to the state of the world as he so far views it."_

The next time Mifune visits the shop, she brings a book with her.

"I saw this at one of my other regular haunts and thought of you," she says when she hands it to him. "You like these, right?"

The title on the front cover claims the contents are the five hundred most challenging crosswords ever. Goro flips it open to a random page. Fifteen across, _venomous viper_. He counts out the spaces and doesn't pick up a pen to write in the word adder.

"Thank you," he says, setting it aside and returning to the notepad he's been scribbling in. He is, grudgingly, writing out a list for Sae.

_"Pushing for college just for the sake of college was hasty," she admitted. "I'd overlooked...well, let's just say I miscalculated, and I apologize. Perhaps a better first step would be to define a goal. When we meet again, let's say, in two weeks at 3 PM--you can pick the spot--bring a list of what interests you. Hopefully that will allow for a more productive conversation."_

He hadn't even intended to do it, except on Sunday morning he'd found himself awake in time for super hero hour with nothing to do and happened to be thumbing through tv channels when he came across a new episode of Vedfolnir Ranger Featherman Ultimate Z. And while he's always unironically and embarrassingly loved Featherman, he'd pictured Sae's face as she pored over his list of interests designed to pigeonhole him into a respectable wage-earning member of society and the first entry was Featherman.

The idea amused him so much that it carried him through the day, and on his way back from Ms Kitamura's house that night he'd stopped into the convenience store to buy a pen and a notepad. When he got back to his apartment, after kicking off his shoes and hanging his jacket over a chair, he'd torn the plastic wrapping off the notepad, uncapped the pen, flipped to the first page, and wrote _Featherman_ in his most exacting penmanship.

That he's kept up with the list now, each bullet point become steadily more serious and self-reflective, did not mean anything.

"Say, have you read this?" Mifune asks, waving a book in front of him. Goro pulls his mind back to his temporal reality. The book in Mifune's hand is a copy of _Carrie_ by Stephen King. "Normally I read nonfiction, because I'm trying to learn things I can use to help advise my clients. But when I heard you and the old woman talking the other day, I thought maybe fiction could give me other examples."

"Er," Goro says. He would recommend _Carrie_ in a heartbeat if someone asked him, but he still feels bad about suggesting Ms Kitamura read _House of Leaves_ \--and more to the point, Mifune says she reads to learn how to help her clients. _Carrie_ is only the example she could give to her clients who have psychic powers they could use to light their tormentors on fire; handy, but statistically unlikely.

"I do like _Carrie_ ," he says, "but for what you're going for, I think _Kitchen_ by Banana Yoshimoto would be a better read, based on what you're looking for."

"Do you have that?" she asks as Goro takes the book from her hands and sets it aside to reshelve. He leaves his spot behind the counter to walk between the shelves.

She smiles and thanks him after he rings her out. "I never asked," she says, "how your fate worked out after you drew that card."

Goro had forgotten about the stupid card; he recalls it now, and his unfortunate run-in with Takamaki later that evening. She'd been particularly belligerent, even in comparison to what he remembers of her.

"It didn't work out," he says.

"That's a shame," Mifune says, and smiles again. "Maybe the next one, yeah?"

Goro bids her good day.

* * *

Carl Jung wrote, _A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves._

Goro passed through of his passions and underwent gravitational collapse in the process. He's never liked Jung: too fascinated by the occult, to his mind, to take a truly objective view of the maze of mirrors that is the human mind. If Jung could have known about the metaverse, personas, the god of control, he'd probably dance on his own grave. Goro's view has always been that people are people, often more selfish than not. 

Ms Kitamura invites him over for dinner so often that it starts to become routine. He has leftovers in his refrigerator most days. Mifune visits so often that her presence becomes part of the store. She has him draw a card each time and tells him what sort of wisdom he's destined to receive.

"How do they mean anything?" Goro asks one day, staring down at the two of swords. The image on the face is of a bound and blindfolded woman holding a sword in each hand. "It's just a picture."

"Sure," she says, shuffling through the cards until she finds a specific one and holds it out for him; the figure on the face is a crowned woman holding a single sword aloft. "But it's based on cultural imagery, and imagery is all based on human cognition. It's basically about...well, have you heard of the collective unconscious?"

Goro, who has stamped through the manifestation collective unconscious and dragged specific people out of it and into a very personal hell, laughs softly. "I'm acquainted with the writings of Jung."

"Right," Mifune says, squaring her shoulders. "So you take this card, for example. This is _Justice_. Justice as a concept is traditionally depicted as a woman in a blindfold with a sword--or a set of scales, or both. The idea is that because she's wearing a blindfold, she's impartial. And the idea behind it goes back a way long time, but the result is that there are layers of meaning behind picture printed on a simple piece of paper."

"And you make a living from this?" Goro asks, unable to mask the rude incredulity in his voice.

Instead of taking offense, Mifune laughs. "Yes? But also it's more than that. Mostly what people pay me for is to be a quiet shoulder to lean on who can offer them a little bit of guidance when no one else will. Most people, you go to the doctor and they just write you a prescription. But medication doesn't really help..." She trails off, waving a hand in the air expressively. "All of it, y'know? People need more."

"I see," he says, seeing and really not seeing all at once.

"Let me show you," she says, drawing that velvet bag from her pocket and pulling the deck of cards inside to hand to him. "Shuffle the cards, and I'll read them for you. The price--hmmm.... You have to recommend my next book to read."

* * *

Karl Marx wrote, “ _The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being."_

_(The look Mifune gives him when she leaves isn't pitying, but it's too-familiar, too-knowing._

_"I used to be like you," she says before she takes her leave. Her hand hovers over his wrist, not-touching, like she knows the contact would be unwelcome but wants to express the good intention of it all the same. "I thought I didn't have anywhere to belong. I just got lucky, and one day someone walked into my life who showed me that I had a place in the world after all."_ )

There's something uncanny about her, he'd realized as he was playing along with her game. He'd written her off as nonsensical and soft, but with a pair of deft hands, a few cards, and a steady voice, she'd pared him open as if with a knife.

"I'll do a five-card spread," she says "That gives a lot of room for interpretation." 

Goro draws a card and lays it out in the first spot. Goro is doing this, somehow, and can't comprehend why. _This is ludicrous_ , a part of his brain tells him while another part laughs hysterically. He's read Chomsky, de Beauvoir, Voltaire, Hume, Locke, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard. And now he is, at nearly twenty-one, watching a woman read his fate with extravagant playing cards.

He draws the cards and lays them out, rear-side up, on the table, and then she flips them over and explains them in turn. Witch each movement of her hand, she explains the meaning of the card and its placement and how it relates to the other cards in the spread. With each gentle twitch of her fingers, she draws him a picture of a future.

* * *

Mifune said a lot of words, all of which hold no logical weight. She spoke of positions and causes, the future and potentiality, as if they were all things she could see.

It's all stupid and meaningless omphaloskepsis. This picture means this, because this mythical writer said that. He could challenge the entire concept to a debate, and he would win, ten times out of ten.

_Justice_ stood there in the center, so clearly a knot at the center of multiple threads, a butterfly fixed to the center of a specimen board. A thing that whispered, _Come discover. Come unravel my depths_.

"It's really not about seeing," she'd said, drawing a neat boxed outline around the card labeled _The Hanged Man_. "I've had plenty of times where I've _seen_ , and then someone--usually a certain someone, if I'm being honest, but that's beside the point--proved me wrong, and suddenly everything was different the next time I did a reading. Even if I was asking the same question. Over and over, the wheel turned--and the funny thing is, every time you turn the wheel, the future changes."

Her fingers danced from _The Hanged Man_ to _Strength_ , the fifth card in the spread; she plucked it up between two fingers and held it up to face him, the card upright.

"Do, or do not," she said. "There is no try."

Goro looked from her, to the card, and back to her, trying and failing to keep his verdict of her delivery from showing on his face. She dropped the card back onto the counter and pressed her hands to her face as she dissolved into a fit of giggles.

"I only saw it once," she protested, "right after I moved to Tokyo, at a really bad party with a bunch of people who thought--well, they had a lot of thoughts about _enlightenment_ means. Don't judge me!"

Goro judges her anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A huge huge huge huge heaping of TREMENDOUS THANK YOUS to Krist (songofproserpine on AO3), who has been my little writer buddy bee, especially these past few chapters, ESPECIALLY this chapter. Krist actually took the time to read a five-card tarot spread for me to use in this chapter. Her reading and her explanation were INDISPENSABLE in making literally all of Chihaya's scenes work. (This post-chapter A/N is getting long so I asked her to comment with her full reading that she gave me, in case anyone is interested, because it's AMAZING.)
> 
> (EVERYONE GO READ HER FIC KRAKRGALDR RIGHT NOW. It's so good. I love it!!!!!)
> 
> This chapter was delayed by a lot of things. Partly because I wasn't sure how to proceed to where I want this to go next. Partly because depression. And also partly because Fire Emblem: Three Houses, although GOOD NEWS for people who like this (people like this???? apparently???? I love you), I don't own a Switch so I can't immerse myself in the game, so my ADHD brain can't take over and perch on my shoulder like a vulture to scream, "EDELETH TIME NOW."
> 
> "Omphalosklepis" is literally just the Greek term for navel-gazing, because Goro is that fucking pretentious. "Vedfolnir Ranger Featherman Ultimate Z" is me taking Featherman and just trying to expand on it in an Ultraman way. Vedfolnir is a mythic bird from Norse mythology and also a shout-out to Krist's Krakrgaldr.
> 
> So many philosopher quotes and I have never read a single philosophical text in my life, but I do know how to google my philosophers! And I'm willing to bet real money that Goro would lean towards the more radical ones.


	8. Chapter 8

After helping Ms Kitamura clean up after dinner one evening, Goro asks if he can use her coffee maker.

"Whatever for, dear?" she asks, drying her hands on a towel. The dishes are all clean, stacked neatly in the drying rack, the counters and table wiped down. There's a bag on the genkan step at the front door with a container of leftovers inside; she usually gives the balance to Goro, insisting old age makes for poor appetite.

He lifts a shoulder in a careful shrug meant to communicate he doesn't particularly care if she refuses. "I haven't had after-dinner coffee in a while," he says. "It's supposed to aid in digestion."

"Well, let's see what I have," she says, reaching up to open an overhead cabinet. Her fingers hover just short of the door. "Oh, dear," she says, turning to look for her stool. Goro steps around her to open the cabinet for her, and she beams up at him through her legion of wrinkles. "Having a tall boy like you around makes an old woman's life easier. If there's any in there, it should be in a dark container."

Goro pushes past packages of instant dashi, yakinori, and sesame seeds. Tucked back in the corner is a small dark metal canister. Goro pulls it out and opens it to study the contents; the smell of coffee powder drifts up to meet him. "I found it," he says.

"Good, good," Ms Kitamura says, shuffling towards a lower cabinet that holds cups and glasses. She pulls out two mugs and looks back over at him. "It's your treat, right? Do you need me to do anything?"

"No, it's fine," Goro says, pushing the cupboard closed and moving over to a drawer to dig out a measuring spoon. "Please go take a seat and let your feet rest."

"Such a good boy," she murmurs, smiling again before moving in her slow, steady way to the living room. He hears the television flick on, and the quiet drone of a newscaster's voice filters through the air like static.

Goro only knows how to make instant coffee, so he puts the kettle on and leans back against the counter to wait for it to hit a boil, letting his eyes rove over the little kitchen without much interest. The stove is an older gas model, the counters made of cultured marble stained and dulled with years of use. The front of the fridge, an older model judging by the design, is peppered with important papers and photos held pinned to the surface by magnets shaped like flowers and books.

One of the photos catches his eye: a faded snapshot of a young couple with outdated hairstyles and wearing outdated clothes, their arms around a little boy dressed for his first day in kindergarten. The boy's mouth is split wide open in a smile, a small hole in the perfect white his teeth where he lost a primary one early. The couple have the kind of happy, healthy look of well-situated young parents he can't remember ever seeing in his mother's face.

Another photo is a head shot of a young man in a blazer and tie, only barely managing to look somber enough for the photo. His glasses make him look wise; the subtle curve of his mouth speaks to a kind and caring nature. Goro remembers Ms Kitamura referencing her son once or twice, but where she spoils Goro with her warm-hearted praise, she never brags about her own son.

There's a whole history behind Ms Kitamura, he realizes and feels dull-witted for only now recognizing it. He sees her in his mind and realizes she's a person with an internal life he knows nothing of, a story of life and loss and love and loneliness, Plutchik's model given human shape.

The kettle begins to whistle. Goro hurries to pull it from the stove, his thoughts scattering. He fills both of the cups with hot water, returns the kettle to a cool burner, and mixes the instant coffee into the cup. When he's finished, he brings both out into the living room and sets Ms Kitamura's gently on the side table beside her chair and takes his own seat.

The newscaster is talking about the recent weather patterns. Ms Kitamura mumbles her commentary: a litany of quiet aches, her memories of her childhood. Goro lets the sounds sink into the silence inside of him. When his coffee has cooled enough that it won't burn his tongue, he takes a sip. The profile is bland, the flavor lacking the richness he remembers appreciating.

He yearns for a really good cup of coffee for the first time in years.

* * *

When Akira gets home, Haru greets him brightly from her space behind the counter where she's waging careful war against whatever bacteria on the countertop have managed to escape Sojiro's very thorough ministrations.

"Welcome back!" she says brightly. "Did you have a nice day?"

"It was fine," Akira says. He spent the day in Shinjuku with Yusuke, first at an art gallery and then later, after a meal that broke Akira's budget for the week (because Yusuke has still not learned impulse control and "no" is still not a word Akira has learned to use), people-watching for Yusuke's inspiration. 

It's a Sunday, and Sunday afternoons are Haru's time at Leblanc. When Akira returned to Tokyo, she'd asked him if Sojiro might be willing to teach her how to make coffee, and somehow that turned into a pseudo-apprenticeship where Haru volunteers her time one day a week to watch the cafe, giving Akira and Sojiro the day off.

Sojiro has been taking more time to himself lately, closing the shop early or opening late, or asking Akira if he's able to pull extra shifts outside of the schedule they agree upon each semester after Akira gets his class timetable. It leaves Akira wondering if Sojiro's ready to retire from retirement altogether, and if Sojiro does that, what becomes of Akira's home? Even compared to Crossroads, Leblanc is the only place he can say has ever really welcomed him. He can't imagine a future where he doesn't hear a bell ring every time he steps through his front door, a life that isn't wrapped up in the smell of wood polish and roasting coffee and spices--which is exactly his problem.

He drops his bag off up in the attic, then heads back downstairs to join Haru at the bar. She pulls a container out of the fridge and puts in into the microwave to heat up, then moves down the bar to grab one of the little cups and sets to work making coffee.

"I'll take a Black Russian," Akira says. Haru shoots him a look with pursed lips that's too undercut by mirth to be called stern.

"Flat white," she shoots back, biting her lip to suppress a smile, "with dark Sulawesi Kalossi."

"Okay, yeah," Akira says, resting his chin in his hand and letting the counter, his bone structure, and physics in general hold his head up.

The microwave dings cheerily. Haru hums a quiet tune as she finishes making his drink, then sets it delicately in front of him with the tiniest clink of porcelain on wood so she can retrieve the food. He picks up the cup and holds it beneath his nose, not caring how the steam fogs up his glasses so long as he can suffuse himself in the smell. In the background he can hear the echoes of Haru's careful movements, and he comes out his sleepy stupor with a jolt when she slides a plate in front of him.

"Don't get too excited," she warns, picking at the edges of her apron with nervous fingers. "Boss had me make this batch. I hope it's okay."

Akira brings a spoonful to his mouth and takes a heavy bite. It's not Sojiro's, not by a long shot, but it's that same recipe crafted by a woman who knew what made food spark across the tongue, interpreted and reinterpreted through three different people. It tastes precisely like Haru made it, sweet at the top but with a bite of fire underneath. It's perfect.

He could drink this coffee and eat this curry forever, and it'd still never be enough.

* * *

Once a week, on whatever day that semester Akira's and Futaba's schedules manage to align, Sojiro closes up shop early and they congregate back in his house for family dinner.

Futaba started it in her third year of high school, stressed from her looming college entrance exams she would pass with careless flying colors and the way her family had managed to snap back together only for all of them to be stuck dancing around each other in the new adult world most of the rest of them were striding off into. 

"I either eat here with a bunch of strangers around and some rando going off on the tv, or I eat at home alone," she'd said one night, curled up in a booth with her knees tucked beneath her chin. She had that petulant note in her voice that said she was being selfish and she knew it, and she didn't care because she was right. "I'm sick of it! Dad, can't we all have at least one night where we eat together like a family? Please?"

So they put their schedules together and came up with a day each week they could cut off the rest of the world and just be with each other. Futaba still kept calling it family time. Sojiro still was too awkward to use the word. Akira still was desperately glad he'd found a real father and a little sister, even if no one called them that in relation to him.

Over dinner tonight, Futaba chatters excitedly about her classes. She's studying engineering ethics this semester, among other things, and has a lot of thoughts about, among other things, personal privacy and data security. Akira is treading water just trying to keep up (his moral framework mostly boils down to spying=bad, which is ironic in Futaba's case), and Sojiro looks like he's drowning.

"So then I asked about the inherent morality in Sony using your PSN account to aggregate data about your gaming preferences for sales analytics, and then he said--"

"Oh, hey," Akira says, "did you ever text Hifumi? She said she's excited to play Starcraft with you."

Futaba, dragged off tangent, deflates like a balloon: quietly and with prolonged fanfare. "I texted her, and she asked me what my favorite MTG card is."

"What did you say?"

"I don't even play Magic! I told her she needs to play Yu-Gi-Oh instead."

Akira, who can picture Hifumi's reaction to that so well because he's seen her react to it in real time, shuffles away a laugh.

"Anyway," Futaba says, "in the interest of being transparent with regards to computer ethics, I think I should tell you where some of the bugs I planted are."

" _Some_ of the bugs?" Sojiro asks with a barely-suppressed sigh.

Futaba lifts a hand to point her finger dramatically at Akira. "He's friends with a guy who used to be in the yakuza!" she says. "You want me to expose all of our defenses?"

"Iwai's a good guy," Akira protests.

"Yeah," Futaba says, "but one day one of those other guys he used to hang with could follow you home! What then?"

Akira pauses to consider that. "Well," he says, remembering several separate Iwai situations that have happened over the past few years, "once he hears about it, Iwai would make a call. And then the person following me wouldn't be a problem."

"For a kid who's so clear-cut you got an assault charge for stopping an assault," Sojiro says dryly, "you sure know how to pick your allies."

Akira picks up a grilled onion and drops it into his mouth. After chewing and swallowing, he says, "Iwai's the kind of guy who would bring a knife to a gun fight and still win because he outplayed you from the start. Also he said his salamander tattoo also includes me."

Sojiro laughs. "Neither of you speak a language I understand."

"MORE RICE PLS," Futaba bellows.

"Okay," Sojiro says, laughing again. "I understood _that_."

* * *

Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, he has class at 11 and 6. Tuesdays and Thursdays, he has class at 9 and 4. Saturday is a morning seminar at 8 AM, which he hates with a passion and hopes every time that a meteor will strike the planet and wipe out the class in general, but him specifically.

(Why did he agree to major in business? It made his father happy, until he ignored his connections. It made his mother happy, until he refused an internship. His father had been furious in turn, and his mother had made pleading cries.)

So on Tuesdays and Thursdays, he closes up shop; Saturdays are by request or volunteer, whichever comes first. This weekend Futaba wants Sojiro to go with her to the Nagoya Science Museum. Akira makes them all breakfast--grilled mackerel and tamagoyaki, cooked at a proper angle so the shapes hold. Sojiro stops in the doorway as he leaves, one hand resting against the crown of his hat.

"You sure you don't mind?" he asks, eyes moving from Akira to the empty cafe. "I don't mind keeping it closed for the day if you want to tag along."

Akira smiles at him from his place behind the counter. "I'm good," he says. "You both deserve a day where it's just the two of you."

"Well, if you say so," Sojiro says, not sounding convinced, but he ducks his chin and waves farewell anyway. The door swings shut behind him, its bell ringing cheerfully in the silence until it stills.

Akira makes himself a ristretto with one of the more expensive beans, then sets to work cleaning. The first customers start to trickle in around 11, by then the counter is gleaming golden in the sunlight slanting in through the windows.

Akira knows the regulars, knows their faces, their orders, their tempers and their complaints. They come in dull-eyed and he brings them coffee; they come in with yawning bellies and they leave full, with an empty plate dark with curry in their place. He listens to their cares and their worries when they share them and offers them what quiet words of support he can give. 

It's so familiar, doing this, so comfortable and natural, and he could do it forever. All of his friends are set for brilliant futures, and he's happy just as he is. Bringing tired people coffee and serving hungry people curry; meeting basic needs.

As the day goes on and the customers trickle more out than in, Akira brings down some of his homework to work on. Going over business problems is like cornering himself in a back alley and shooting himself in the head. Every question feels so divested and heartless. He gets, from an objective sense, what the point of it all is supposed to be, but he can't apply it to his own life. Maybe Lala can invest herself in the idea of profits and losses in a way that's meaningful enough to keep moving herself forward; Akira studies it and keeps thinking about Okumura's palace, the robots lining themselves up in happy order one by one to die. What's the point of the profit if there's no heart in it?

The bell over the door jingles cheerfully. "Good evening," Akira says, marking his place in his book before turning to the door. He's already grabbing for a soft towel and a menu when he sees the person standing there, silhouetted in the dying sunlight.

Akira's heart stutters. It's been three years; it's been a million years. He's a far cry from the boy who used to rile up crowds of spectators with a smile and a word; in a simple button-down and jeans, he looks like any other college student. Something about him is faintly hollow in comparison to the sharp-specter memory Akira has. He's lost weight, when he was already thin.

"I hope I'm not intruding," Akechi says into the silence, fiddling with the cuff of one of his gloves.

"Not at all," Akira says. The edge of his mouth curls up into a smile. "Welcome home." 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Surprise! Things are finally happening. I went back and forth with Krist over whether I should show the moment Goro decides to go back to Leblanc, but I wanted to let his development speak for itself. I hope it feels earned! I rewrote the last three paragraphs like ten times.
> 
> I spent a good hour and a half down a researching rabbit hole learning about coffee. I still feel like I know nothing. I think Akira would like dark roasts, but Goro would prefer sweeter drinks. Haru asking Sojiro to teach her how to make coffee and then winding up working at Leblanc despite not needing the money is one of my personal favorite headcanons.


	9. Chapter 9

_In the end, the decision is easy. If dragging the Phantom Thieves across hot coals is the only way to put Shido in jail, only one person should take that fall: the person who abetted him in the first place._

_Akira argues back, voice hot and insistent; Goro hates martyrs, with or without a cause. The younger Niijima counsels rationality; he can see the way her eyes cut across to him, the judgement in them. She thinks he should be the one to get flayed alive, and Goro can't disagree._

_He writes out his confession and signs it without flourish. He sits in the witness stand while Sae reads it out loud to the judge and the peanuts in the gallery._

_"In your sworn confession, you attest to being a member of the Phantom Thieves," Sae says, and she's the one person he can't hate even as much as he wants to, his collaborator and the executor of his sentence. "You also claim you acted as such to enact revenge against Masayoshi Shido, whom you claim is your biological father."_

_The nutcrackers' teeth chatter at the shock and the scandal._

_From the corner of his eye, he sees the Phantom Thieves sitting in the public seating area, an overly-conspicuous assortment of teenage rabble. He sees eyes blue with pity, eyes dark with conflict. Not one of them stands up to defend him. He's the lamb they'll sacrifice to escape the slaughter. He's guilty, and he hates all of them for it anyway. If only Okumura hadn't--it all would have been fine._

_He'd written himself off a long time ago._

* * *

Akira remembers how he takes his coffee; why this surprises Goro is beyond his acuity. The words _welcome home_ settle in the air and create an uncomfortable tightness in his chest; he's probably due for a stroke, it's fine. He's left with a vague, creeping awareness at the back of his mind that he's swallowed a lie he told himself. It's only him that believed his presence was unwelcome all this time.

(He remembers mental conversations he had, when he was in juvenile hall, with a phantom in his head. Arguments about leveling and _sittlichkeit_ and categorical imperatives. He'd seen that shade as a debate partner he'd wanted to have, an intellectual companion when he was surrounded by middle school dropouts. The shadow had dark hair and gun-flint eyes and spoke in a voice with biblical echo.

He'd been looking for some truth even then that had seemed so archaic at the time, when really it was so simple.)

Akira sets a cup in front of him with delicate movement and only the slightest whisper of porcelain scuffing against wood. "Light Colombiana Luminosa," he says, pressing his fingers into the wood, "latte with whole milk, right?"

Goro's fingers don't tremble when he picks up the cup, blows on the surface to take a sip. It's rich and filling and a jolt to his nervous system, and something in it fills him up with warmth that he doesn't know how to filter or process. His body, being a body, manages to stutter-shuffle along even if his mind can't.

The cafe is quiet as Akira makes himself a drink, outside of the subtle sounds of water bubbling and filtering through the coffee machine. Akira carefully collects every last drop before taking his cup, cradled between two hands, to hover across the counter from Goro. Goro is at the spot he's always taken, two seats from the door, with just enough space to escape and just enough evening sunlight to filter through the windows.

"What have you been up to?" Akira asks. Goro can see the way he curls his hands around his coffee cup, indifferent to the scald of hot porcelain. He's seen those hands wrapped just as surely around the hilt of a knife. Remembers the refraction of light off the blade glinting through the red-tinged filter of his visor, the blade jerking away before striking home.

Goro takes another sip of his coffee and lets it pool, warm and safe, in his belly. Recent medical studies have drawn the conclusion of a connection between the digestive tract and the brain, something about microbiota in the gut reacting to present molecules and triggering synaptic activity within the brain. "Working, mostly," he says, his voice smooth. "I have a decent part-time job. When I'm not at work, I find things to occupy my time."

He reads books, he reads Wikipedia, he does crossword puzzles, he makes lists and lists and lists, and above all, he avoids thinking about anything that would make anything too-raw fester up inside of him, which is how he wound up here on a quiet Saturday evening, by not thinking about it at all.

Maybe there's some truth after all to Philip Larkin writing, _In the absence of poetic impulse nothing stirs._ Maybe thinking, the act of consciously scrutinizing a fact or a feeling and using rules of logic penned by dead men to drive it into a neat, tidy little box, is more pernicious than not. Not _I think, therefore I am_ , but _I am, and so I am._

Descartes was on his bullshit roughly ninety percent of the time.

"Mood, as Futaba would say," Akira says. "Tell me about it? I've got the time."

Goro tells him--just a little, just enough. He leaves just in time to catch the last train.

* * *

> **Akira:** Akechi stopped by leblanc tonight  
>  **Ann:** !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  
>  **Ann:** !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  
>  **Ann:** !  
>  **Ryuji:** dude  
>  **Ryuji:** ann r u ok  
>  **Ann:** __**!!!!!!!  
> ** **Ann:** shut up ryuji!!!  
>  **Makoto:** Sis will be pleased to hear that.  
>  **Futaba:** home base is the only safe place now doot doot  
>  **Haru:** Is he doing alright?  
>  **Akira:** he looks tired, but he sounds okay  
>  **Futaba:** where am i supposed to get curry now????  
>  **Yusuke:** wE DID DECLARE AN AMNESTY, IF i RECALL  
>  **Yusuke:** Apologies. Capslock.  
>  **Futaba:** IS NOT CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL, INARI!!!!!  
>  **Futaba:** HOW do you even accidentally type in caps but not caps the normally capital letters if you're on a phone  
>  **Yusuke:** I am at the library.  
>  **Futaba:** oh  
>  **Futaba:** WAIT JUST A MINUTE

* * *

Sae, eyebrows lifted in dubiety, is a figure missing from a Renaissance painting. Not that Goro has studied art specifically, but he knows tangentially that Michelangelo is a thing.

"Featherman," she says flatly, her voice sharper than Occam's razor.

Lunch this week is at a tiny diner in Akasaka. Despite Sae's promise Goro could pick the place, her schedule takes precedence; she has a client in the area she has to meet with afterwards. Goro finds he doesn't mind.

He meets her eyes, innocent as sin. "You asked me to list topics of interest."

Sae's fingers twitch against the notepad. "I'd expected...academic disciplines," she says. The look she levels him is unimpressed. "Not TV shows."

Goro smiles. "Any form of media can impact one's sense of self and desired outcomes," he says. "You asked for a list of my interests. Is it shameful to you that an adult would enjoy a children's superhero show?"

Sae's eyes flash; she can tell he's playing with her, she knows he's stepping away from the answer she wants. All she needs is the check number, but Goro's happy to make her wait for it.

"I think one of the sergeants in the Public Security Bureau knows the actress who plays Pink Argus," Sae says, taking a delicate sip from her coffee. She lifts an eyebrow, her mouth a pin-stripe line that somehow conveys amusement nonetheless. "Should I ask him to set up a meeting?"

He knows when his play has been turned against him. Goro steeples his fingers together on the table and says, "And have the chance to be on TV again? The muses sing in my dreams. Perhaps it's fate?"

Sae rolls her eyes, and this time the corner of her mouth does quirk up in a smile. "I'll tell him you've decided to explore other opportunities."

Goro smiles wide enough to show teeth. "How optimistic of you."

As they go to part, Sae stops, one finger tapping on the folder she put his list in. Her expression is thoughtful. "It wasn't so bad," she says. "Your list. I'll go over it and come up with some suggestions."

She says it like a promise, the potentiality settling in his belly, her vision in conflict with his apathy. Goro wants to argue back. As if she can read his thoughts--and maybe she can, he's become so lax in guarding them--Sae lifts her manila folder in one hand and taps him on the forehead. "Mind your elders," she says.

Goro pulls away and shrugs an apathetic shoulder. "If it makes you happy," he says.

* * *

Akira texts with irritating regularity.

Since he went to lunch:

> **Akira:** an american just ordered a decalf venti soy latte with an extra shot and cream  
>  **Akira:** an extra shot of what?????  
>  **Akira:** cream of what???  
>  **Akira:** the soy is always happy to cream i guess  
>  **Goro:** Have you suggested the customer ask a chemist to detail how that works on a molecular level?  
>  **Akira:** no but i might now. this woman wants a frozen latte without ice. i am not a chemist, but i guess i have to explain thermophysics to a rando without a degree  
>  **Akira:** rando is a random person. sry i talk to futaba too much to be healthy  
>  **Goro:** I am familiar with the term rando, unfortunately.

It's familiar in a way that isn't familiar; normal in a way that isn't normal. It makes him feel vaguely nauseous and anxious that something he never had is going to be taken away.

"You young people and your phones," Ms Kitamura says from where she's nestled in her chair, reading a magazine. The front cover is covered in bold, eye-catching statements: _ZEN ELEGANCE: When Mind & Heart Open Spirit Flows Freely_, and _How Forest Bathing Boosts Immunity_. He may have to have a word with Mifune the next time she stops in. "But you're smiling, so it must be something good."

Goro doesn't slap his phone down onto the counter. He _doesn't_. The action of slapping implies a loud, resounding sound accompanying the action, and no such sound is heard. He sets his phone face-down onto the counter very firmly and very decisively.

"You're mistaken," he says, his mouth a firm line. "I wasn't smiling."

Ms Kitamura clucks her tongue. "If you say so, dear."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Twenty bookmarks over 2000 views, and over 200 kudos. YOU GUYS ARE AMAZING!!! I'm so happy so may of you like my hamstrung words. I started this project for myself, but also, like most writers, hoping for appreciation. The consistent comments I get every chapter have been AMAZING. The reaction to the last chapter specifically have really lifted me. We're a fandom. I write this for all of us.
> 
> Goro: NO I AM NOT SMILING NO ONE IS SMILING I AM NOT HAPPY PLEASE DO NOT INSINUATE OTHERWISE.
> 
> The sergeant Sae mentions is obviously Akihiko.
> 
> I know some people were expecting this chapter to be heavy. And I kind of thought it would be too? Then I started writing it and I realized the heaviness will be coming later. I am saving it up to portion it out at the exact right time.


	10. Chapter 10

Akira dreams of a ship slicing silently through the waves of a rancid ocean littered with the skeletons of human purpose. In the belly of the ship, there’s a wall standing between him and someone who matters.

“Promise me, Joker,” the ghost on the other side says. Akira beats his fists against the uncaring metal to the rhythm of gunfire. When everything turns to silence, he jolts awake, something heavy and nauseous dragging down his belly. 

Morgana is standing on his chest, making biscuits with his shirt and purring like a Rolls Royce. “Are you okay?” he asks, wide blue cat eyes peering down at him in concern. “Your heart was racing and you sounded like you were crying.”

“Bad dream,” Akira says, dragging an arm over his eyes. He can’t remember the details, but it felt like something was losing, like something was lost. He’s had dreams like that, on and off, since graduating high school. Dr Takemi tells him it’s a result of stress caused by not knowing what he wants from the future. She offered some home-brewed medication as treatment; Akira, who has enough guts to last a lifetime and has suffered enough nausea from her first patent, politely refused.

“You have work today,” Morgana reminds him dutifully, then wrinkles his nose. “Sorry, I mean you have _rent_ today.”

Akira yanks his pillow out from under his head and smothers it against his face with a groan. “What time is it?” he asks; through the pillow it sounds like _hwa hwim s ‘hit_.

“5:30,” Morgana supplies cheerfully, used to interpreting Akira-through-pillow-speak.

Akira groans.

* * *

After lunch, Akira is halfway through the latest volume of _Kino’s Journey_ when the front door of Leblanc slams open.

“Entering the front-cover star of _PopSister_ magazine, the idol of the month, Ann Takamaki!” Ann declares as she runway-struts through the door and strikes a cutesy pose, complete with a peace sign. The cafe is, thankfully, empty.

“Sorry for the intrusion,” Shiho says sedately, following in Ann’s wake and pushing the door gently closed behind her.

Akira marks his place and sets his book aside. “I’m guessing Mika lost.”

“Mika lost?” Ann repeats, shifting to pose like a sentai hero. “Mika _lost_? No, no, no, Mika didn’t just _lose_! Mika was last out of _five_ , and guess just _who_ number one was?” Akira, who had the issue delivered to his doorstep, definitely knows who number one was.

He grabs the canister of Brazilian Bourbon off the shelf and starts making Ann’s usual quad non-fat, one-pump, no-whip mocha. Ann drags out a chair and climbs into it like she’s climbing onto a stage, only to stumble at the last moment and drop into the seat with an _oof_. Shiho climbs the bar stool like someone ready for the endeavor, her movements better-controlled and much more graceful. Must be the soccer. Akira respects that.

“Enough about me,” Ann says before taking a hefty sip of her drink and immediately devolving into a coughing fit because it’s still too hot and she swallowed it too fast. Akira’s already ready with a glass of cold water and a napkin; he’d recognized the look in Ann’s eye the moment she reached for her coffee. Even after a year and a half, he still notices those things and knows exactly what kind of mayhem to expect afterwards.

Akira’s eyes cut to Shiho, who’s smiling patiently and patting Ann’s back like a volleyball. She can see how Ann looks too, how Akira still notices, and it makes her laugh; Akira is fine with that. The awkward thing about your ex dating her best friend is that both of them come to you for advice at the drop of a hat.

Akira wishes he had advice to give. He’s still trying to explain dating girls to Hifumi.

When Ann’s done hacking up a lung, she slaps both palms down on the counter and gives him a Look. “I’m not here for no reason!” she says, grasping the far end of the bar and using it to pull herself until her spine cracks. “Wow, that felt great! Anyway--” She glares at Akira, who shuffles back up against the bar and wonders what his transgression is, “I need an update, right now. What did he say, exactly word for word? I’m grading you on your performance.”

Akira runs his mug beneath the hot-steaming water from the faucet and places it in the dishwasher. “He came by for coffee. We talked. That was about it.”

Ann is a sieve with little enough information. She looks up at him, blue eyes wide and pleading. “And?” she asks.

“We talked,” Akira says. “That’s about it.”

Ann heaves a sigh and stares up at him with kicked-puppy eyes. “I thought you’d say that.”

* * *

Futaba’s stretched out on her bed and smack in the middle of the Battle of Garreg Mach when a door slams shut downstairs and Sojiro yells, “Futaba! Dinner!”

And it was just getting good too! Futaba groans and tosses her Switch aside.

Down in the kitchen, Sojiro and Akira are emptying bags of groceries and setting out ingredients for dinner. Akira catches Futaba’s eye and gives her a sly smile; she leans across the counter to hold out her fist for a fist-bump. Akira pulls a small package out of the bag, winks, and tosses it towards her; Futaba catches it and peers between her hands to find little cartoon koala faces peering up at her, perfectly ready for eating. “Yissssss!” she crows.

“Hey!” Sojiro swivels a finger between her and Akira. “How many times do I have to say it? Candy _after_ dinner.”

“Awwwww, come on, Dad,” Futaba pleads, fingers itching to tear open the tooth-edge of the foil packaging. 

“Yeah, come on, Dad,” Akira deadpans from where he’s cutting up an eggplant, the knife snicking quietly through the vegetable to thunk against the cutting board.

Soijro throws up his hands. “I’m too old for this. Futaba, come wash the rice.”

It’s easy to fall into family patterns, making dinner, setting the table, sitting down to eat. Futaba knows her way around the rice cooker and the microwave and that’s about it; she leaves the actual cooking to the cooking gods. Whatever they make, it always smells amazing and tastes just as good.

“How’s school?” Sojiro asks the both of them between bites, his starts to conversation always clumsy. He’s a natural with strangers but awkward with the two of them, the opposite of Futaba.

“I got to see a nanorobotic build today!” Futaba tells them, dropping her chopsticks to set off on an excited ramble. It’s not exactly part of her program, but any time she comes across new technology, she can see the limitless possibility of humanity unfurling in front of her in a thousand different directions. 

“How ‘bout you?” Sojiro nods at Akira when Futaba distracts herself from synthetic molecular motors with more food.

“School’s fine,” Akira says, evasive without being cagey. Futaba, who still has a rider on his phone that’s tapped into his GPS, among other things (she said she’d get rid of _some_ of the bugs, not _all_ of them), knows he skips class more often than he admits to, but he manages solid marks in all classes regardless. Even if he didn’t, she wouldn’t judge. She sees the tiny current of frustration that he tries to hide as he watches their friends stride effortlessly into their futures.

Sojiro sees a lot, Futaba knows. Maybe he sees it too. If he does, he doesn’t say anything; Akira and Sojiro are private people, prone to sharing their worries when no one else is around. If Sojiro has anything to say about that, he’ll say it in the quiet hours he and Akira spend at Leblanc when the customers are all gone.

“Work treating you okay?” he asks instead. Akira shrugs.

“Crossroads always treats me okay,” Akira says. “And Leblanc...you know how Leblanc is.”

Sojiro smiles, something thoughtful lurking in his eyes. “Yeah, I know.”

“Speaking of,” Akira says, setting his chopsticks down and glancing at Futaba with careful deliberation before looking away. The tips of her fingers and toes start to buzz. “Akechi stopped by Leblanc the other day.”

Sojiro says something to that, but Futaba doesn’t hear it. The buzzing creeps up her arms and legs; she grips the seat of her chair with her hands and hooks her ankles around the legs. Maybe it’s uncharitable of her, but the thought crosses her mind anyway: _Oh, great. Home base isn’t even safe anymore._

( _“Yusuke is right,” Haru says in her gently lilting voice over the phone. “We did agree to an amnesty. We know what he’s been through. He took the fall for Akira, and for us. I certainly don’t forgive him and I never will, but I don’t begrudge him taking up space in our lives.”_

 _Futaba wants to say she agrees. She_ does _agree. She signed right up for Amnesty Express along with the rest of them. But teeth-clenching teamwork was one thing, and she’s had three years to prepare herself for facing him without masks on and not wanting to throw something--preparations she's studiously avoided every step of the way._

_“I understand you’re feeling anxious,” Haru says when Futaba doesn’t say anything. “I’m anxious too.”_

_But between Haru and Futaba, it’s not the same thing._ )

“Futaba, you okay?” Sojiro asks, peering at her through his glasses with evident concern.

Futaba gives them both a bright smile. “Fine, Dad,” she says, too chipper by half.

Akira nudges her foot with his below the table. Futaba kicks him back, not out of spite.

 _Sorry_ , he texts her later that night when she’s curled up in her chair with the lights of her monitors turning the room green. _That was a dick move._

 _yes it was_ , she texts back. _but i get why you did it. i forgive you_.

She always forgives him.

* * *

The bell over the door never seems to ring so much as dance cheerfully, singing brightly in the air. Haru, on her knees behind the counter where she’s carefully pulling cookware off the shelves to dust them, jolts at the sound and narrowly avoids smacking her forehead on the hard wood of the bar.

“Just a moment!” she cries, swiping with quick fury at the shelf before hurrying to replace the various pots and pans. She shoots to her feet like a rocket and suddenly sneezes once, twice, thrice, in rapid succession. When she blinks her eyes open, they’re watering.

“I’m so sorry,” she says, dropping the dusting rag on the back counter and pulling a tissue out of her pocket to rub at her nose and eyes. When her vision’s clear, she turns around to face Makoto, who's barely containing her laughter.

“Are you okay?” Makoto asks, her lips thinned out with the effort of not smiling; she can’t manage to contain it enough that the corners of her mouth don’t turn up. Haru tugs at her apron and pats her hair down self-consciously.

“Geez, Mako-chan, you could have said that was you!” Her cheeks are flushed with embarrassment, but then she meets Makoto’s eyes again and they both start laughing.

Once they’re both calmed down, Makoto settled at the bar and Haru’s hands freshly scrubbed, Haru grabs all the necessaries to make Makoto’s order. Makoto rests her chin in her palm and watches her with soft eyes.

“You look like you’ve gotten really comfortable here,” she says. “When you first started, I was worried you wouldn’t like it, and if you didn’t like it you wouldn’t be able to achieve your dream.”

“I love it here,” Haru confesses, pulling down a canister of beans and prying it open. She takes a whiff of the coffee inside and smiles. “It’s not nearly as busy as I would like, but Sakura-san is a great teacher. Thanks to him showing me the ropes, I feel like I’m almost ready to take the next step in building a solid business plan with President Takakura.”

“That’s great,” Makoto says, giving her a warm smile. She’s wearing a modest shade of colored lip gloss, something she picked up from her friend Eiko. “I’ll be first in line on opening day.”

Haru beams at that and sets Makoto’s coffee in front of her without a sound. “What brings you here today? If you wanted to hang out, you should have texted me. I can always make room in my schedule for you.”

Makoto turns away from Haru to study Leblanc: the sunlight shining in through the door, lighting up the motes of dust dancing in the air. The gleaming wooden floors and tables, the booths upholstered in soft worn leather. The stairs climbing up into the attic, where they used to plan on how to steal the future to give back to all the people who’d lost it.

“I wanted to see you,” Makoto says, turning back to look at Haru with wine-dark eyes, “here. I wanted to make sure you were okay, here.”

“Mako-chan…” Haru says, not understanding.

“All week it’s been eating at me, the worry that he’d come here when you’re alone,” Makoto says, looking away now. She picks up her coffee for something to do with her hands and blows gently over the surface to cool it. “Not even that he’d do anything, because I honestly don’t think he would, but--would _you_ be okay? Emotionally, I mean.” Her eyes widen and she sets down her coffee to hold up her hands in apology. “That was--sorry. That was too forward, wasn’t it? I’m prying too much.”

Haru offers Makoto a hand and a smile; Makoto take both. “Thank you for worrying about me,” Haru says. “It’s not too forward. I’m more okay than you think. It was a shock when I ran into him, and yes, he was awfully rude. I’m not going to pretend that I understand, or that I’ll accept that. But--”

But. The same questions have been dancing around in Haru’s mind, before Akechi returned to Leblanc and in the days after he did. Can she really face him as a person? Can she never forgive him, and still talk to him, and be okay?

“He’ll never be someone I confide in or can become close to,” Haru says, squeezing Makoto’s hand in her own. “I’ll never let him into my heart. But he can’t trap me or hurt me. I feel for him, but I know myself too well. Thanks to all of you, thanks to you and to Akira and to everyone else, I’m too strong for that.”

( _In her mind’s eye, she’s five years old and sitting in bed with her father next to her, back when he still had time to read to her. Their house then had been a modest one-story thing in Nerima; her father had put his sweat and tears into buying it for them._

“ _He had neither lost nor won but_ ,” her father reads, “ _naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark._ ”)

Haru knows her whole true self. All the rest is confetti.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So yeah I decided around chapter 2 that Akira dated Ann during the time of the game. They broke up soon after he moved back to Tokyo. I'll get to why later because it's important, but they are very much the most amicable exes to ever be exes and Ann is still very important to him.
> 
> Uhhhhhhhhh also in case it wasn't obvious in the earlier chapter plus my icon but I'm very gay and will ship okujima until I die k thanks.
> 
> There are so many subtle and not-so-subtle references to different works of fiction in this chapter.
> 
> \- "Promise me, Joker." - My brain was literally hearing, _Promise me, Ned,_ from ASOIAF when I wrote that.
> 
> \- The book Haru's father is reading to her in her semi-flashback is _A Wizard of Earthsea_ by Ursula K Le Guin. I've actually only ever read one Le Guin book ( _The Telling_ ), but she stands among my favorite authors regardless because of how formative that book was for me and how much I just KNOW I'll love the rest of her stuff. Sometimes you just find authors like that.
> 
> \- _The rest is confetti_ is a line from Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House. In context the line is incredibly heart-wrenching and also really warm and uplifting.
> 
> I have more detailed thoughts about Futaba and FE3H. _I_ may love Edelgard, but Futaba would not. Futaba is Golden Deer ride-or-die. The candy Akira bought for her is Koala's March. I used to eat it when I was little; we somehow found it at an international store. It's like pocky, but inside out? I can perfectly picture Futaba eating Koala's March like Americans eat gummy bears: limb by limb and with great sadistic pleasure.
> 
> I read Futaba as having ADHD and am writing her as such. I also have ADHD so like, Mood.
> 
> If stuff seems spaced weirdly it's because I'm changing from writing in Evernote to writing in Google Docs, and I'm still learning how copying the text over to AO3 affects the formatting. I'll be going through and fixing it over the next few days.


	11. Chapter 11

Sae returns his list with one of her own, seven universities with programs she’s personally vetted. He flips through it without feeling anything, then lifts his eyes to hers.

“Was something in here supposed to spark joy?”

Mifune was in the store again last night. She spent half the time trying to talk him into another card reading and the other half chattering incessantly about _The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up_.

Sae lifts a perfect eyebrow and takes a sip of her tea. “If it happened immediately, that’d certainly be ideal. More realistically, I’d like you to look into them. I took the liberty of contacting the schools in question and having them mail you literature.”

“ _Mail_ me literature?” he scoffs. “How Gen Y. Why not just have them email me?”

“I considered that.” She taps a finger against the rim of her teacup. “But throwing away mail requires more effort than moving it to spam. I’m hoping once the envelope’s in your hands, the curiosity will do the rest.”

He almost sneers but manages to school his features into imperious disdain instead. She’s probably right. He hates her.

When he gets back to his apartment that evening, he shuts the door and leans against it, his head tipped back against the whitewashed steel. 

In his shitty public middle school he’d placed at the top of every class. When high school entrance exams came around, in every practice exam, he’d had the highest score. The Children and Families Bureau wouldn’t pay for cram school for its wards; he worked harder than any of his peers, all just for a number, to see his name at the top of the list. To gratify his teachers, he built an image of the poor, downtrodden orphan with dreams bigger than his station, took their recommendations and grabbed at the first private school with a fancy name that would throw a full-ride scholarship his way.

They all praised him, but nobody would ever _see_.

Sae’s unrelenting and aggrandizing persistence that he make a map to the stars makes his teeth ache and his brain freeze. She has a checklist of the bodies at his feet and insists, regardless, that he follow the script other people adhere to.

If he’s being honest (and just the thought, _being honest_ , feels like a root canal), he wants--something. A place. A purpose. Warmth. Something he can call his own.

Things he doesn’t deserve, but craves regardless in an animal way.

* * *

> **Goro:** Can I ask you something?  
>  **Akira:** hit me  
>  **Goro:** Why did you decide to major in business?  
>  **Akira:** I didn’t really decide it. It was more like…  
>  **Akira:** my hometown is in the middle of nowhere  
>  **Akira:** and it pretty much sucks  
>  **Akira:** between here and there, I wanted to be here.  
>  **Akira:** college was my surest shot back to Tokyo  
>  **Akira:** I had to make up something to keep my parents happy  
>  **Goro:** Are they?  
>  **Akira:** not that they’ve ever told me

* * *

“When’s your birthday, Goro-chan?” Ms Kitamura asks one day, apropos of nothing.

She’s been teaching Goro how to rebind old books with rice, and the shop certainly smells like it; at least three people have walked in today and asked what’s burning. He turns from where he’s standing in the back room, a bowl of steaming rice glue in front of him and an amateur literary dissection to his left.

“June 2nd,” he says, curiosity not pressing on his tongue. “Why do you ask?”

“We already missed it,” she says morosely, like she’s recounting a tragedy. “I was just thinking--my son’s birthday was last week, so--”

Goro remembers the photo hanging on her fridge of a man with sharp eyes and a kind smile. Ms Kitamura is kind, above all things. That man must have grown up treasured and encouraged and loved.

How wondrous that must be.

“Your son?” he says, pretending at nonchalance, when she tapers off. 

Ms Kitamura hums. He can hear her fiddling with the radio, the speakers cutting from static to muffled voices and back again. She should buy a new one, or better yet turn to streaming, but the old are immovable in their ways. “I haven’t said much about him. I normally brag too much, but given the circumstances… Well, what can I say?”

She grows quiet, then bids, “Come out here and sit down, would you?”

“The glue is going to dry,” Goro protests.

“Let it dry,” she says. “Rice is plenty.”

Goro casts a dubious eye over the eviscerated book, wipes his hands on a towel, and pulls his gloves back on. When he steps through the curtain dividing the store from the back room, Ms Kitamura nods him towards a stool and he takes a seat. He has always been, even from childhood, a person of exact posture. He can take a position and hold it for hours, hold it for days. He settles his hands in his lap in an expression of attention and prepares himself to spend the next several hours thus.

He really doesn’t want her life’s story.

“Our son was the kind of boy who frustrated other adults,” she says with a fond smile. “He was too clever. You’re not supposed to praise your children so open-handedly, but he’s not here anymore, so I can say it. He was so smart he could be wicked. When he was in grade school, his teachers didn’t know how to deal with him.”

“It sounds like he was troublesome,” Goro says.

“So troublesome!” Ms Kitarura says, laughing. “How many times I got called in to talk with his teachers… He thought he knew everything. It wasn’t until he was in high school that he found himself challenged by his teachers, and then he started to really do well.”

In elementary school, there’d been a girl who had two mothers, her biological mother and her mother’s partner. The other children had tormented her relentlessly; back then Goro was a child enough to believe anyone could be a hero, and he’d defended her. It hadn’t been enough; the bullying grew so extreme her mothers transferred her to another school, and Goro doesn’t know what became of her after. Thinking about it now, he wonders, uncomfortably, what her life looks like now.

“He wound up going to college and becoming a teacher. His favorite students were the troubled ones. He could take a struggling teenager and turn them around like snapping your fingers, he was that good.”

Something sits heavy at the back of Goro’s throat; he can see the intermission and already knows where this story goes. “What happened?” he asks, because she’s telling her story, and the telling has to keep being told.

Ms Kitamura makes as if to pull off glasses she doesn’t wear, moves to set them down. Goro glances at her to see a face that’s barer, more raw, too exposed, and hurries to look away; it burns itself into his mind anyway.

“There was a car accident,” Ms Kitamura says with the deliberate calm of the dying as she folds her hands together over her chest. “Life is like that sometimes. What can you do? One day he was there, and then one day he wasn’t.

“But,” she adds, “he left behind a persimmon tree at his school. And _oh_ , was it beautiful in the spring.”

* * *

Sae is right of course, because Sae is always right. He gets the first envelope and can’t stop himself from tearing it open. The instinct is as primal as the desire to press the red button: lock Pandora away in a room without boxes if you want to avoid calamity. He hooks a finger into a gap in the seal and rips it open; the sound of paper tearing is satisfying even if nothing else is.

Inside is a heavy booklet printed with glossy photos, the cover invitingly printed with the words _Welcome to Tokyo Metropolitan University!_ Its contents promise unparalleled education in science and the humanities. Tucked neatly in the middle are two packets, one for the sociology program and one for psychology. Goro rolls his eyes at the first and barks a derisive laugh at the second.

Maybe he can become a pioneer in cognitive psience and die slowly from irony.

He flicks through the packets, looking listlessly over course listings, and throws the entire thing in the trash. He almost, _almost_ sends Sae a photo of it afterwards.

He’s sitting at the chabudai in his living room later, watching a cooking competition without much interest, when his phone buzzes against the table. He turns it face-up to read the screen, expecting to see Sae’s name or even Ms Kitamura’s, and instead he sees Akira’s. Goro debates setting it back down, ignoring the call, and then he swipes up from the left and presses the phone to his ear.

“Hey,” Akira says, his voice thinner through the speaker. When Goro doesn’t respond, he says, “Akechi? You there?”

“I’m here,” Goro says, breathing in through his nose. He palms the tv remote and dials the volume down; on the screen something’s caught fire, and several of the contestants are rushing to extinguish it. “Sorry. Did you need something?”

“I just--” Akira starts, then cuts himself off. “I haven’t heard from you. So I thought I’d check in and say hi.”

“Ah,” Goro says. “Hello.”

A sound comes through the speaker that might be an exhale, or a quiet laugh. “Hi.”

Conversation isn’t something Goro has ever been particularly good at. He’s certainly good at _pretending_ he’s good at it, good at playing a role to get attention and keep it, but actually conversing? Being a present, honest party in an exchange of dialogue? He finds his tongue glued to the back of his teeth.

“How are things?” Akira asks. Akira, who can talk to anyone from any walk of life and relate to them with little visible effort; Goro is jealous of many things, and as long as he’s being honest, he may as well admit that’s one of them.

“Things are fine.” Goro thumbs through the stations until he finds one that’s just static, drops the remote and lets the white noise wash over him. “Did you have to work tonight?”

“No, I’m, uh--honestly, I’m building a model Gundam right now.”

The unexpectedness of the answer surprises Goro, and he lets out a startled and abbreviated laugh; something clatters on the other end of the line. He quickly presses a hand over his mouth in an attempt to smother any other too-genuine outbursts. “I don’t know why I’m surprised,” he finally says with careful measure. “That sounds like the kind of inane thing you do.”

“What can I say? I’m good with my hands,” Akira says then falls silent suddenly, immediately followed by the sound of something slamming down on wood. “Sorry, that sounded--sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Goro replies.

“Anyway--” The word jumps through the speaker, too fast. “If you’re not doing anything Thursday, you should stop by Leblanc. It shouldn’t be busy. We can hang out at the bar.”

Goro runs Thursday through his mind, looking for a reason to refuse and coming up short. He could make something up. He could say he’s booked, an easy lie. Ms Kitamura is always an easy excuse from anything. “I’ll try to be there.”

It’s only later, when he’s in bed trying to fall asleep and the anxious human brain is, in its way, playing over the beats of the conversation that the unintended innuendo hits.

He grabs a spare pillow and shoves it over his head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If this chapter seems a bit rough, that's because it is. I struggle with transitions. I know where this next arc should go, but I'm still working out how to take it there. I'm laying the ground work now, so I hope it pays off in the long run.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll update the tags at some point. Forgive me in the interim. My computer took a crap on me, and I literally bought the cheapest Chromebook I could just so I could keep writing.
> 
> I have a plan at this point, obviously. I've alluded to it enough. It's just working towards it that's the Thing.

When Thursday afternoon rolls around, Goro gets to the front door of Leblanc and turns right back around to leave.

Sakamoto and Kitagawa are there in one of the booths; he recognized the bright spot of color of the former’s hair, the absurdly tall silhouette of the latter, through the chessboard-perfect glass panes before he spun on his heel and sped rapidly back in the direction he’d come from.

He gets halfway back down the street to the train station and turns off into one of the little dead-end alleys to lean against a wall and take deep, even breaths, to calm the small panic attack he’s most certainly _not_ having. The idea that Akira asked him over only to set him up, with malicious premeditation, for an uncomfortable reunion with others bubbles up in the back of his mind, bubble quickly popped by the glacial certainty that if Akira were going to set him up for anything so punishing, it would be locking him in a room with Okumura, Sakura, and several blunt, heavy objects they could swing at him.

 _What did you think?_ the mocking voice of logic asks in his brain. _That you’d go back to Leblanc and not encounter a single other soul you know?_

So _yes,_ he thinks with vicious self-deprecation, maybe he had been entertaining a fantasy where he could go back to Leblanc, the only place he’s ever felt any attachment to, and face Akira, the only person he’s ever felt really tried to understand him, and never have to face any other human beings who had been a significant part of any part of his life. Up to and including the irritatingly insightful talking cat 

His phone buzzes. Goro stares up at the blue, blue sky and eventually pulls it out of his pocket. The notification is, of course, a text from Akira.

> **Akira:** who would win in Mario Kart?  
>  **Akira:** Caravaggio or Jesse Owens?  
>  **Goro:** What?  
>  **Akira:** asking for friends  
>  **Akira:** Caravaggio apparently “possessed fine motor skills to a degree” that he could handle a Joy-Con  
>  **Akira:** Jesse Owens was an Olympian runner, so he like…..goes faster  
>  **Goro:** Would either of them have ever played a video game?  
>  **Akira:** yeah that’s what I said  
>  **Goro:** Perhaps Mario Kart is an analogy for chariot racing?  
>  **Akira:** ohhhhhhhhh that’ll distract them 

Goro finds himself staring at the screen, even as Akira stops typing, reading back over their texts. He finds himself, inanely, smiling: it’s such a small thing, such a _stupid_ thing. Between Caravaggio and Jesse Owens, who would win a game of Mario Kart? He can picture the context: Kitagawa and Sakamoto, each picking their sides in a debate with no basis in logic.

Is that how normal relate with one another, sheer nonsense every day? A dialect mutually intelligible between only two people? The chaos of it all. Did he and his mother ever share that kind of language? It’s been too long; he can’t remember.

But he’s curious which side of this stupid debate is crushed first.

* * *

The bell over the door chimes merrily; Akira looks up from his spot behind the bar to see Akechi standing in the doorway, the late-afternoon sunlight falling softly behind him. He looks more put-together this time, his button-down less wrinkled under a pale blue vest, his dark slacks pressed free of wrinkles.

Akira smiles, warm and relieved. It still feels too fragile, Akechi being back; he still worries that he doesn’t believe they want him around. Guilt gnaws at him, hungry. He’d thought they had so much time, once.

Ryuji and Yusuke shift to look at the door a moment later, curiosity always their mutual driving instinct. Yusue lifts a hand in greeting once recognition settles in. “Akechi,” he says, “good, a third party to help us settle this debate.”

“What the hell!” Ryuji exclaims, bypassing any greeting that would have been on his tongue at Yusuke’s statement. “What do you mean, a _third_ party? Akira’s already involved. If Akechi’s here, he’s obviously a fourth party. The hell did you learn math?”

“While I trust Akira with both my life and with my art, he clearly isn’t taking this question seriously, which unfortunately disqualifies him as a third party. Akechi presents an amenable alternative.”

Akechi looks uncomfortable. Then Akechi says, “I haven’t played Mario Kart, but I find it historically unlikely Jesse Owens or Caravaggio have played it also. Have you considered your argument would be better suited using Murakami Takashi and Usain Bolt?

Ryuji and Yusuke look from Akechi to Akira, then back to each other. The argument breaks out anew.

Akechi looks subtly pleased with himself when he takes his usual seat and Akira slips his usual order in front of him.

“Oh, hey!” Ryuji yells suddenly, slapping his hand on the table. Akira looks around for the ghost of Sojiro; Akechi looks like a deer caught in the headlights of a car. “By the way--uh, sorry for the delay, but--Akechi! Welcome back, dude.”

“Indeed,” Yusuke agrees in his baritone. “Your heralded return is well-met. It’s good to have you back among us.”

“.....Dude,” Ryuji says, “are you like, allergic to talking like a normal person?”

“I speak as normally as anyone,” Yusuke protests.

Akira glances at Akechi through the filter of his eyelashes to where he’s hunched over on the counter, his hands curled in a gentle circle around a steaming porcelain mug--not touching, cautious of the promise of burning. “Thank you,” Akechi says, his voice precise and even. The air feels heavy, like something more should come after that, but nothing does.

Ryuji and Yusuke leave. After a while, Akechi does too. He hovers at the door, perfect in poise but somehow managing to capture the energy of a child fiddling with the ends of his clothes.

“Thank you for inviting me,” Akechi says. “I’ll see you again soon.”

He leaves, and Akira feels the word soon linger in the air, feels it echo. _Soon, soon, soon soon._

Akira smiles. The cafe still feels empty after everyone leaves.

* * *

> **Akira:** I think if I had to pick for myself  
>  **Akira:** I’d be Jon Bon Jovi  
>  **Goro:** I’ve already decided that I don’t want to know  
>  **Akira:** you don’t think it fits me?  
>  **Akira:** _i’m a cowboy_  
>  **Akira:** _on a steel horse i ride_  
>  **Akira:** _I’m wanted dead or alive_  
>  **Goro:** What kind of horse is made from steel?  
>  **Akira:** uhhhhhhhhh  
>  **Akira:** a subway? or a car?  
>  **Goro:** That sounds like a rather tired metaphor  
>  **Akira:** that’s the first time you forgot to end a sentence with proper punctuation  
>  **_Goro:_ ** _[ .....typing....]_  
>  **Goro:**   
>  **Goro:** We can’t all be captains of grammar,  
>  **Goro:** but we can some of us defy the rules  
>  **Goro:** [ . ]  
>  **Akira:** for the record, that looks like something that’s definitely not a period boxed in by semicolons  
>  **Goro:** Behold what magic I can work with the Oxford comma.
> 
> * * *

It’s another Monday. Goro wakes up and brushes his teeth, makes himself a cheap protein shake for breakfast and chugs it down like it doesn’t taste like pancake batter.

The bookstore today is bound to be infuriating, and it is. He has his abandoned book-binding project to return to, which takes up half his morning. Then Ms Kitamura calls out to him mid-afternoon. Goro steps out from the back room, sweat dotting his forehead, and wipes his hands on the apron she gave him. “I’m sorry it’s so sudden,” she says, sounding genuinely apologetic as she coughs into her kerchief. “My doctor asked me to come in right away. I hope it doesn’t trouble you. If it’s an inconvenience, let me know. I don’t mind you closing up early.”

Goro bids her on her way and divides his time between the book he’s rebinding in the back room and the sluggish trail of who happen to pass through. The kinds of visitors this store attracts are few and far between, less interested in buying than they are in being. Maybe Goro could relate to their instinct to be if didn’t so vociferously contravene the purpose of the shop.

It is, of course, a bookstore, the point of which is to buy and sell published literature to generate a profit. 

Somehow, he hates that.

> **Akira:** how was work today? I’m assuming you did work fyi  
>  **Goro:** Clearly.  
>  **Goro:** Work was fine. Work was  
>  **Goro:** I suppose you’d say it was--  
>  **Akira:** I’m going to cut you off right now.  
>  **Goro:** I  
>  **Akira:** what’s going on?  
>  **Goro:** I dont  
>  **Goro:** I don’t know.  
>  **Goro:** Ms Kitamura left early and I closed up.  
>  **Goro:** I’ve done it before and never disliked it any.  
>  **Goro:** Never mind.  
>  **Goro:** I’ve never disliked it.  
>  **Akira:** she’s your boss, right?”  
>  **Akira:** kitamura  
>  **Goro:** She is the proprietress of the store, yes.  
>  **Akira:** tell me about her.

Goro stares at his the blank monolith of his screen, open and hungry for data.

He presses a finger to the call buttom and, improbably, finds words in his throat that want to break free.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is, apparently through subconscious writing, kind-of dedicated to my problematic mom, the try-hard queer-supporter. She's a dedicated Jon Bon Jovi fan. I apologize for nothing where Joker's scene is concerned.


	13. Chapter 13

There’s a reason Goro is up at 1 AM rereading _Das Kapital_ , and it’s entirely Akira’s fault.

“If wages are supposed to rise because of competition between businesses, why is the federal minimum wage only ¥1000?” Akira had complained through the phone after an apparent evening spent fighting with his school reading. “The news won’t stop talking about how millennials aren’t saving for retirement. We’re not even millennials! What do they expect us to retire on, one-yen coins and pocket lint?”

“The problem is they’re making you read Adam Smith,” Goro had said, carefully working on a book rebinding. He’d asked Ms Kitamura for permission to work on some of the more desiccated tomes back at his apartment, in his own time. It gives him something to do and a strange sense of fulfillment: he hasn’t _created_ anything, but by the work of his deft hands, something is serviceable once again. “You should read Marx if you want more nuance. Commerce has no inherent morality other than that required to exchange currency for products and services.”

This had, inevitably, devolved into an argument on the nature of an ethical society that accounts for human fallibility. All very much par for the course given their history: they’d spent more than enough time locking ideological horns when they were teenagers, it’s only natural they’d fall back into it. The more they pursued the topic, the more Goro found himself winding up, snatching for lines from half-remembered theses. 

He hadn’t noticed Akira growing quieter and quieter until suddenly Akira interrupted him mid-sentence to slur, “You know...it sounds nice, hearing you get that worked up about something.”

Goro stuttered; Goro stopped. Tried to account for why his mouth suddenly felt so dry.

“And like you can tell me about that Marx guy some other time but….” Akira trailed off, an audible yawn crackling through the speaker of Goro’s phone. “I’m like...literally about to pass out. Sorry.”

After they hung up, Akira, presumably, went to bed. Goro sits up in the quiet dark, brain fizzing with late-night drunken alertness, and tries to read.

* * *

The next time Goro visits Leblanc is far more ominous: he’s halfway through taking his first sip of a truly delicious cup of coffee when the door slams open and Takamaki walks in.

“Akira!” she declares in that cutesy can-do, too-peppy voice he’s always hated. “Big news!”

“Sorry for the intrusion," a slimmer wallflower of a woman says as she follows in behind her and shuts the door. It must take a moment for their eyes to adjust to the change in light, a moment Goro clings to and begs desperately for time to discover the secret of limitless self-cloning, because Tamakaki doesn’t notice him immediately.

Then she does notice him, because both time and the universe care not for his wishes.

“Akechi???” she says, her voice pitching to an ear-splittingly higher octave. “Akechi!!!! Holy crap!”

He’s sitting in his usual chair at the bar with the curved back, twin chairs crowded close at either side. A handy defense against unwanted contact, or quarter-American blondes.

“Ann, maybe you could…” the other woman begins to say, tugging at Takamaki’s sleeve; has she not yet learned the definition of futility?

Akira returns his glasses to his face from where he’d been wiping them and moves down to the end of the bar, past Goro. “Hey, Shiho,” he says, completely ignoring Takamaki. “You going for a double today or an affogato?”

The woman--Shiho--laughs. “How about you surprise me?”

Between Akira and Shiho, they're able to manhandle Takamaki into the booth at the other end of the cafe. Takamaki, easily distracted, launches herself into an animated conversation with Akira and her friend; something-or-other about soccer and nationals. It’s no surprise Akira’s so capable at managing her; he remembers them in the early throes of teenage romance, and for all that he cannot comprehend how Akira could still be dating her.

Once Akira is back behind the bar, alternating between cleaning, going over his schoolwork in quiet peace, and checking in on the level of caffeine in everyone’s cups, Goro feels an infuriating itch at the back of his neck. Of course it doesn’t go away even when he rubs at it; he turns around.

Ann Takamaki is staring at him; when he meets her gaze, she lifts her eyebrows and returns his look with a coy smile.

Goro gives her what he hopes is his most contemptuous stare and returns to his meticulous scrutiny of _The Poverty of Philosophy_.

* * *

“Gooood afternoon,” Mifune says when she steps through the front door. Ms Kitamura, confined to chair-rest whenever Goro can enforce it, waves at her with a handkerchief from behind the counter.

Mifune’s eyes are too-wide as she leans over the counter, hovering. “Are you okay, ma’am? You shouldn’t be working if you’re sick.

Ms Kitamura laughs, her hand waving away any worries. “It’s just a summer cold. Everyone fusses so much because I’m old. When you get old, you’ll want them to keep themselves to themselves just as much.”

“Cleaning with antibacterial gel is not fussing, Ms Kitamura,” Goro says. “It’s called being hygienic.”

Ms Kitamura reaches out and pats his arm. “Goro-chan looks after me as well as any old woman could hope for,” she says.

Goro returns to shelving books, pointedly ignoring them. It’s too warm in this store; his face feels hot.

“How old are you?” Mifune asks him before she leaves.

Goro eyes her and wonders if this is a trick question. “Twenty,” he says.

Mifune heaves a sigh of relief. “Oh, good. I don’t feel bad about giving these to you, then. She grabs his thankfully-gloved hands and shoves something into them. Goro yanks his arm free to study what she’s forced on him: a small deck of business cards, well-made with glossy, embossed print.

“I finally signed my lease, but my shop’s in Shinjuku,” Mifune explains, waving a hand in the air as if she’s conjuring some immutable energy. “I always hate referring minors there because I know it’s an easy place to get into trouble. Will you give those to your friends for me, please?”

“Feel free to leave some at the door,” Ms Kitmura offers in her overly-generous way. “I’ll let my customers know how helpful you’ve been.”

Helpful in what way? Goro wonders if he needs to keep an eye open for more pseudo-science rag sheets.

He’s left with a handful of business cards he pockets when he should throw them away.

* * *

Akira’s phone buzzes; he’s elbows-deep in trying to make sense of historical materialism, so he ignores it. After it buzzes a few more times, he finally pulls his phone out of his pocket and flips it over to read the screen.

The first notification string is from Futaba, a run-down on her opinions of the American Evangelion release on Netflix. _VERY BAD_ , she warns in bolded and italicized half-sentences. _CUTS THE HOMOEROTICISM BY HALF. 3/10, WOULD NOT RECOMMEND._

The next notification is from his chat app and his conversation with Akechi. Akira marks Futaba’s messages as read and thumbs over to Akechi’s chat.

It’s actually a picture, a photo Akechi took in a poorly-lit bookstore; Akira realizes it must be the store where he works. The photo is of a business card, and below the photo, Akechi’s careful typing: _A regular asked I pass her business information on to people I know. I can’t lay claim to six degrees of separation, so here you are. I'll gladly throw this away now._

Akira looks at the photo, has to blink and clear his eyes and look again. 

_______________________________

CHIHAYA MIFUNE

PSYCHIC/PERSONAL CONSULTANT

0XXX-XX-XXXX

NOW ON INSTAGRAM!

_______________________________

> **Akira:** this is from a regular?  
>  **Akechi:** I would have no reason to share this sort of trite nonsense otherwise  
>  **Akira:** interesting  
>  **Akira:** huh…………………  
>  **Akechi:** Forgive me if I lack the necessary nuance to understand SMS messages  
>  **Akechi:** But I think I mislike your tone  
>  **Akira:** have you ever been to my other job?  
>  **Akechi:** I wasn’t aware you had another job  
>  **Akira:** i’m a non-alcoholic bartender  
>  **Akechi:** What?  
>  **Akira:** at a drag bar  
>  **Akira:** in Shinjuku

It takes Akechi just long enough to formulate a reply that Akira knows he’s got him.

A part of him doubts. Three years is a long time to last without another person. Akira remembers three years ago, when the necessities of justice had cast all their pieces off the board. It’s not that Akira couldn’t just tell Akechi he’s actually very well acquainted with Chihaya, and that he’s been a solid support for her in her attempts to establish a legitimate business. It’s more so that--

Circumstances are different. This isn’t a company about to cut off its dead ends to make them meet. Akira is here to try and build something. A real bond, this time. Something lasting.

Akira knows something Akechi doesn’t. That as hard as Akechi tries to run away, Akira will still be here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My justification for Futaba watching the Netflix release of Neon Genesis Evangelion is that 2chan was mocking it, so Futaba watched it to learn how to mock it better. She's a polymath; she's definitely fluent in English.
> 
> I am a nerd for sociology, among other things. Marx was DOPE. (Marx is one of the early fathers of sociology as a discipline.)


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Surprise! Two updates in one day. I'm on a roll. Work is going to be an absolute bitch this week and I probably won't have energy to write when I get home.

_In the bowels of Shido’s palace, a broken boy faces off against people who care too fast, too hard, and far, far too much._

_When he sees his doppelganger step from the shadows, it’s with a sense of ugly, delirious mirth._ Of course _, he thinks,_ of course he thinks of me this way _. He was an idiot, when it should have been so simple all along._

_No one’s ever going to praise you. No one’s ever going to welcome you home._

_When he triggers the emergency bulkhead and the heavy metal doors slam shut behind them, Goro sags with relief. He can see it all clearly now, the miserable life and the kingdom of lies that he built for himself. This is the end of his story. It’s a tragic one. It always was._

_He hears a gun cock. His doppelganger moves its thumb from the hammer to curl obscenely back around the grip. “So this is the end of the famous Goro Akechi,” it says in a mocking voice filled with too many teeth. “In the end, you’re just shit on the bottom of someone else’s shoe.” Goro ignores the sounds of muffled voices yelling his name behind him, ignores the sounds of fists pounding on metal. It’s all white noise, the screams behind him and the howl of shadows facing him down._

_One voice rings out, muffled through the metal doors and yet clearer than bells. “Milady!”_

_What happens next is--chaos. Missiles, screaming. Metal, rending. Fire, everywhere. Goro, still in possession of some shred of an instinct for self-preservation, dives for the deck, protecting the back of his neck from shrapnel with rough-gloved hands._

_When the smoke clears, he looks up to see the barricade door cleanly rent asunder, one side sheared half away from the wall and the other crumpling in on itself. At the nucleus of the devastation is Haru Okumura, her persona suspended in the air above her, flower-bright. The overhead lights gleam over the long rows of guns jutting from beneath the persona’s skirt._

_Okumura looks righteous. Okumura looks furious. Okumura is crying. She looks at Goro, pain splintering behind her eyes, and takes a deep breath._

_“No,” she says, raw and imperious. “No more. No one gets left behind.”_

* * *

> **Akira:** so that’s about the gist of it  
>  **Akira:** thoughts?  
>  **Ann:** OBVIOUSLY i am 200% on board  
>  **Ann:** maybe 250%  
>  **Ryuji:** you know me, dude. im always down  
>  **Haru:** I think it’s a lovely idea.  
>  **Yusuke:** Indeed. Given the ordeal we faced at the end, we had little time for such things.  
>  **Makoto:** I agree. It feels like the right thing to do.  
>  **Akira:** Futaba?  
>  **Futaba:** nrrrrrrrrrrgh  
>  **Futaba:** s(・｀ヘ´・;)ゞ  
>  **Futaba:** I _GUESS_  
>  **Makoto:** Are you sure? You don’t have to be involved.  
>  **Futaba:** no. you guys are right  
>  **Futaba:** gotta start somewhere, yeah?  
>  **Akira:** thanks, guys  
>  **Futaba:** UUUUUUGH ripping off bandaids SUCKS

* * *

“I cannot believe I let you talk me into this,” Akechi mutters as they exit Shinjuku Station and join the crowd headed into the city center. He’s fiddling with the cuff of his glove; every time someone bumps his shoulder, something ugly lurches in his dark eyes.

It makes Akira smile. “You’re curious, admit it.”

“I’m not curious,” Akechi protests while looking around at the various storefronts with blatant curiosity. They’re not headed towards Crossroads; Chihaya’s shop is tiny, down a narrow back alley where the rent is as cheap as it can get for the area. Lala was the one who’d told him about it--she had a friend of a friend of a friend who would cut Chihaya a deal. 

She’s been working hard towards this, and Akira’s proud of her. He’d been there the day she opened, with a handful of her regular clients, to celebrate; he’d walked her home afterwards, worried about letting her wander alone back through Shinjuku with as drunk as she was. He stops by every now and then, sometimes bringing his schoolwork with him. Chihaya’s using him to learn how to run a business; Akira thinks that’s fair, since she reads his cards for free.

“Have you been to Shinjuku before?” Akira asks as they cut their way through the crowd.

“A few times,” Akechi says, looking sharply away. “For--work.”

Oh, Akira thinks, and then, _oh_ , as his breath catches. Akechi’s not talking about his detective work in high school. He’s talking about his other job, the much more sinister one. Akira rubs the back of his neck, discomfort fighting a war with compassion.

“I never really paid much attention to the area before, though,” Akechi says quietly, and just like that, the strained moment passes. “I still can’t believe you work at a drag bar.”

Akira laughs.

The view through the front windows of Chihaya’s shop is obscured by gauzy, pansy-purple curtains patterned with stars. Akira pushes the door open and holds it for Akechi with a cheeky smile; Akechi passes by him with a roll of his eyes, and Akira follows him through the door. Inside it smells like sage, bergamot, and lavender. Chihaya’s clients think she burns incense to clear the spirit for meditation, but Akira knows it’s to cover up the smell caused by a water leak from the office upstairs that happened two years ago. Chihaya’s seated behind the counter, looking every inch the 21st century prophet for the masses as she plays Fate/Grand Order on her phone.

“Oh, shoot!” she mutters, locking her phone and slapping it down on counter. “Sorry about that! Welcome--oh, Akira, hi! And...Goro-kun?”

Akira does a double-take. Looks from Chihaya to Akechi and back again. “‘Goro-kun’?”

“Please call me Akechi, Mifune-san” Akechi says, his voice a tired plea.

Chihaya’s laugh is light and airy. “Sorry! I just got so used to hearing Ms Kitamura say your name, that was how I was thinking of you. I’ll call you your last name from now on. I’m surprised to see the two of you together. You guys know each other or something?”

 _Goro-kun_ , Akira thinks dazedly. _Sure. Okay_. “We’re friends,” Akira helpfully supplies, because Akechi--wait, no, sorry, _Goro-kun_ \--probably won’t. “We knew each other in high school.”

“That’s one way to put it,” Akechi mutters.

“He gave me your business card,” Akira says. “Small world, right?”

“You said you didn’t want to encourage minors to visit Shinjuku, and yet somehow you know him because he works at a bar here,” Akechi says.

Chihaya laughs awkwardly. “I mean, if anyone’s going to get into trouble and know exactly how to get out of it, it’s this guy. If only you knew some of the crazy stuff he’s gotten up to. He’s definitely saved my bacon, that’s for sure.”

Akechi listens to that and looks at Akira, eyes calculating. He can almost _see_ the gears turning, is certain he catches the flash of understanding in Akechi’s eyes as realization settles into place.

“She knows,” Akechi accuses in a low voice.

“Oh, she definitely knows,” Akira agrees easily. “You’d be surprised how many people do.”

“What, that this guy was one of the Phantom Thieves?” Chihaya says. “Oh yeah, I’m definitely over it.”

* * *

“Hey,” Akira says later. “Thanks for coming with me.”

They stand side-by-side on the subway, even though there are free seats enough that they could be sitting. When the train car jostles them so their shoulders bump together, Goro withdraws from the contact with quiet patience.

“It satisfied my curiosity,” Goro says dismissively, briefly meeting Akira’s eyes then looking away.

He has one gloved hand wrapped around a bar, the other gloveless so he can fiddle with his phone. He’s scrolling through news feeds without reading them. It feels like something is crawling up his esophagus to sit, curled and biding, in his throat. When Akira suddenly touches the back of his hand, just a brush of fingers against skin, Goro nearly drops his phone. He shoves it back into his pocket and fishes for his other glove.

“Sorry,” Akira says softly, his movements frozen, as if he’s dealing with an uncaged animal. He is; they are. Goro curls his other hand, now too-hot in the pleather material of his glove, around the pole and holds himself in place while the train rocks in its gentle way. 

“Did you need something?” Goro asks, tone overly polite, as if he didn’t just jump away like a startled deer. No need to look below the surface, everything is fine.

“Come back to Leblanc?” Akira asks, his eyebrows raised, hopeful. “I want to show you something.”

 _No_ , Goro thinks. He’s stuck in a game but he doesn’t know the rules, doesn’t even know what piece he is. It’d been a quiet evening like this when he’d found himself, without really thinking about it, boarding the subway and getting off at Yongen-Jaya, his brain filled with static while his body moved for him. He keeps going back, and going back, and going back, like a child at Tanabata who actually believes in magic. Akira looks at him with those so-sincere eyes, and Goro finds himself saying yes, every time.

“Okay,” he says.

They don’t talk after that, but the silence is comfortable, even familiar. Their bodies sway gently with the train right up until they reach Yongen-Jaya’s station, and the quiet stays with them as they wind their way through the backstreets. Everything, everything, feels so familiar.

Akira stops at the front door to Leblanc, his hand resting on the doorknob. The light from inside the cafe paints his face in bright, sharp details; his shadow blends in with the rest of the falling night. The corner of his mouth curls up in one of Joker’s cocky little half-smiles, and he rubs the back of his neck with his other hand. The glint of mischief in his steel-grey eyes makes that waiting thing in Goro’s throat catch and tighten.

Akira opens the door, and Goro follows him through.

In the sudden brightness, he sees all of them: Niijima and Okumura, Sakamoto, Takamaki, Kitagawa, Sakura holding the cat. They’re all wearing the kind of ugly, ridiculous party hats you can only find at a cheap one hundred-yen store, the cafe colonized by bright-colored balloons and confetti.

The Phantom Thieves. All of them.

“Welcome home!” they cheer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The opening flashback is literally what spawned this entire AU. I was thinking of how they could have gotten Goro out alive, and I was like, "Did everyone just conveniently forget that Haru's persona has naval-grade artillery under her skirt???? And then it kind of evolved into this really intense, emotional thing because Haru, who watched her father die on live television, also vocally expresses how much she sympathizes with Goro, and I think that fresh from loss, she'd just be so fed up with the concept of loss entirely that she'd shoot her way through it, literally and figuratively.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think I need to just shut up and stop assuming I'm capable of writing on any kind of schedule and just acknowledge when the writing bug has got me.

Leblanc is bright and cozy. Everyone is cheery and smiling. Goro stops in place, returns a smile that’s brittle and plastic, and lifts a hand.

“Excuse me,” he says, and turns to walk right back out the door.

He doesn’t know where he’s going. _Not here_ is his only thought, which is how he winds up in the laundromat, sitting on the dirty ground with his legs curled up against his chest while he has a minor breakdown.

What the fuck? What the _fuck?_ All of them, even Okumura and Sakura. Every single fucking one of them smiling like they were celebrating the return of someone special. It’s not that he’s-- It’s not, it’s just-- It’s only that--

His mind is spinning, and spinning, and spinning. The sound droning in his ears is the barrel drums of the washers cycling, and Goro laughs hysterically until he hiccups, then laughs some more.

Bright spots of pain on his legs. Goro jerks back to find a fuzzy black mass perched on his leg, needlepoint claws poking through his trousers to nestle against his skin. “Ow,” Goro hisses. “ _Fuck_.”

“You have a problem,” the stupid talking cat says.

Goro moves to shove the cat away, then decides extricating claws from pants is too much effort and presses his hands to his face instead, his head tipped back against the wall. The wall vibrates with the steady _thum-thum-thum_ of the washers turning over.

“Obviously,” he says. “Are you here to gloat over it? Who sent you, Akira?”

Morgana wrinkles his nose and sticks it up into the air, managing to convey an expression of human disdain with a cat’s face. “I’m a cat,” the cat-who-is-not-a-cat says. “As if anyone could ‘send me’ anywhere. I go where I want.”

“Whatever,” Goro says. He’s done. He doesn’t care. “I don’t want to talk to you. Go away.”

“You’re being an idiot, so no.”

“As if you care!” The words tear out of his throat like barbed wire. He drags his hands away from his face to find himself glaring straight past the tiny pink nose and into the sagelike eyes of a creature whose existence is beyond human comprehension.

Morgana unhooks his claws from the fabric of Goro’s slacks and proceeds with making biscuits of his thigh, purring with his whole body. He walks in a circle and settles down on Goro’s lap, vibrating like a rocket motor.

“Listen up,” he says, and he sounds so much like one of the girls from the Velvet Room that Goro squints at him. “Every single person in that room is there because they want to be there. They’ve heard your story and they know what you did, and it’s not that they don’t care, because they do. But they care about you too, even when you refuse to see it.”

“Okumura,” Goro argues, “and Sakura--”

“Don’t talk to me about Haru and Futaba. I’ve been there on nights when Futaba cried herself to sleep.” Morgana blinks up at him, eyes mirror-bright. “You don’t know what she was crying about and it’s not your place to assume.”

In his mind’s eye, he can see them: Kunikazu Okumura’s shadow, Wakaba Isshiki’s shadow. He can see his arm lifted, his hand holding the gun, smoke drifting from its barrel. He’s never told anyone about the dark nights after the Phantom Thieves dragged him, kicking and screaming, from his father’s palace. Never told anyone about dark hours spent hunched over the bowl of his toilet while all the food he’d eaten that day returned back to whence it came, half-digested. He still wakes from dreams of the shades of half-people begging for mercy.

“You’re an idiot,” Morgana repeats.

“Yeah,” Goro agrees.

“And you’re going back to the party.”

“Okay.”

“Blow your nose first.”

Morgana procures a handkerchief from--somewhere. Goro blows his nose and stares at him.

“What?” Morgana asks.

“Nothing,” Goro says. “I hate you, that’s all.”

“Oh, well if that’s it.” Morgana hops down off his leg, his tail lifted in the air in a jaunty staff. Goro worries at the needle-point holes in his pants where the claws had dug their way in. Cats are stupid.

He lets it lead the way anyway.

* * *

Akira hadn’t expected it to be easy. He’d been prepared for--he doesn’t know what, honestly. Not for Goro to immediately bolt right back out the door the way he’d come. He’d looked around, stupefied, and the others had looked back, expressions ranging from Makoto’s tight-lipped disappointment to Ann’s round-eyed dismay. Futaba looked relieved and heartbroken in equal measure.

 _So much for that idea,_ Akira thought as Morgana dashed out the door.

When half an hour later, half an hour into sweeping up confetti, the bells of the door laughed quietly and Akira turned to see Akechi standing in the doorway again, his eyes fixed to the floor and his hands pressed flat against his legs, he felt like his whole heart had jumped into his throat.

“Excuse me,” Akechi says for the second time.

Morgana saunters in behind him, curling a tail around his leg as he passes. “Akechi’s done being an idiot. Cake now.”

“Cake!!” Ann shouts, dropping her handfuls of confetti back onto the floor and grabbing for a plate. “God, I have been _dying_ for this moment all day.”

“Some of us have just been plain dying,” Futaba moans. “Period.”

Yusuke perks up. “If you’re actually dying,” he says, “that’s material I’d like to capture, if you’d let me.”

“Oh GOD, Inari, that’s just _gross_.”

The bickering continues; Ryuji gets involved. Haru cuts a slice of cake with the same grace she’d handled a battleaxe and hands it to Akechi.

“I made this cake myself,” she says. “I hope it turned out okay.”

Akechi takes the plate she offers him with hands that don’t noticeably shake. “Thank you,” he says, not quite meeting her eyes.

“You’re welcome,” Haru returns brightly. “You were terribly rude when we ran into each other earlier this year, but I’ll let you make it up to me.”

Akechi, halfway through his first bite of cake, chokes and starts coughing. Akira tries to help, pounding on his back with the flat of his hand, and Ann scrambles behind the counter for a glass to bring him some water.

“Thank you, Okumura,” Akechi says in a raspy voice once he’s cleared his throat. “I’ll definitely...I’ll keep that in mind.”

Akira gives Haru a look with his eyebrows raised; Haru smiles beatifically back.

It’s not like she’s wrong, honestly.

* * *

It’s not _bad_. Futaba would like to state that for the record. Attention Your Honor, Sir, It’s Really Not Bad.

What’s not bad, the reader might ask? Well, only the fiz-popping of Futaba’s nerves as she stands there and blows air through a kazoo while Goro Akechi decides now’s the time to have a psychological reckoning. Or whatever. _Whatever!_ Amnesty, amnesty, amnesty, Futaba reminds herself. They all agreed. She agreed too.

When Akechi drags himself back in half-drunken fits and starts because he doesn’t know how to act like a human being and never did (and really, this should probably endear him to Futaba in some deeply ingrained psychological way, one neurodivergent person to another, but her brain looks at other, normal brains and tells them to fuck right off with that nonsense), Futaba is the first one to grab a slice of cake. Yes, even before Ann. She needs it that much and she’s just that good. Ann just laughs and spoon-feeds herself bites of icing before eating her cake like a machine made for cake. Which she is. 

She sees Akira hovering beside Akechi and wonders whether Akira thinks the rest of them are idiots, or if Akira himself is the idiot. Akira, she decides at the way the light dances in his eyes when he talks to Akechi, Futaba shoving her plate to the side so Mona can devour the rest of her slice of the metaphorical pie.

Consuming simple sugars or carbohydrates can result in a psychosomatic syndrome called a sugar high, rooted in the belief that carbohydrates can affect the brain in the same way ethanol can. It’s junk science, but Futaba finds herself standing up with fists clenched tight and stomping over to Akechi anyway. Blame the sugar instead of her lizard-brain, at least until she’s old enough to drink alcohol.

“Futaba…” Akira says, trying to take hold of her hand.

“No,” Futaba says, yanking her hand free and holding it out to point at Akechi with an accusing finger. “You listen to me and you listen good!”

She’s being too loud again; Sojiro will be disappointed in her. She can only control her volume so much when she gets excited, and maybe this isn’t _excitement_ , but it’s something close. Her brain is celebrating sports day by giving the dopamine plenty of room to run.

“You,” Futaba says, trembling all over because _anxiety_ ; in the back of her brain, she realizes everyone else has fallen quiet to listen. “You better--you’ve got it _good_ , you know? If you don’t appreciate it, I’ll--I’ll--”

“Breathe, Futaba,” Makoto says, her hands moving with the motions of inhaling and exhaling.

Futaba inhales and then exhales. She holds her hand aloft, finger extended, and her arm hovers with her movements. “Everybody stop _fussing_ ,” she complains, and feels a thousand hands draw instinctively back. Suddenly she can breathe again.

“You’re alive,” Futaba says, returning a shaky finger to point at Akechi’s chest. “You don’t get to waste it.”

Akechi takes in a deep breath; it sounds like something wet and scratching. He can’t meet Futaba’s eyes; that’s fine, she can’t meet most other people’s eyes either.

“I know,” he says, and he sounds like he means it.

* * *

The girls go back to sleep at Sakura’s house, and the guys climb the stairs to Leblanc’s outmoded attic. Goro had made only the weakest attempt at declining politely and leaving before he felt tiny kitty claws poking into his legs as Morgana scrambled up to his shoulder like Goro has always been his cat tree. Akira, helpful Akira, has futons to spare for the others, and he pulls out a spare blanket and a pillow for Goro to sleep on the couch.

“...This kind of happens a lot,” he explains with a self-effacing smile. 

Goro’s used to falling asleep in places that aren’t his because none of them ever have been, but there’s always an anxiety that comes when it’s somewhere new. He lies on the couch staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars, zinc sulfide letting the day survive during the night, and listens to the quiet sounds of other bodies breathing.

He never went on his school trip in high school. Work was the easy excuse; in reality, he’d had a target and a cold bullet waiting in his gun. He’s only ever shared a room with other vagrant boys who lived off the state’s paltry charity, in cold rooms with thin sheets and thinner mattresses on the rickety steel beds. You got used to hearing the occasional weeping, learned to sleep with one eye open because you were too sharp-tongued and impetuous for the other boys to forgive.

The attic is just another extension of the cafe: warm and too-homey, the kind of place that invites you to leave your troubles at the door and relax inside. _Safe._ It makes his skin chafe and burn; he hasn’t even removed his gloves. His blanket is heavy and soft with age.

That thing he’d felt earlier this evening, crawling up his esophagus to settle in his throat, hasn’t gone away. It only slithered back down to sit in his stomach, which feels warm and too-tight. When he shuts his eyes and thinks of tonight, it lurches, fizzing uncomfortably. Maybe he has an ulcer; he spent enough of his formative years imbibing an ungodly amount of caffeine.

There’s a quiet sound, a _thump_ , and then suddenly something lands, with all the force of a bowling ball, directly on his spleen. The only thing that keeps Goro from reacting violently and waking up everyone else is the tender prick of needles on his chest.

“What are you _doing_?” he hisses at that loathsome cat.

“You’re not asleep,” Morgana comments, most of his body blending into the darkness, his white markings and gleaming eyes the only things clearly visible. “Why aren’t you asleep?”

“A thirteen-kilogram monstrosity just assaulted me,” Goro says, with deliberate effort to keep his voice low. “Anyone would be awake after that.”

“Rude!” Morgana protests. “I only weigh 4.5 kilos. I just had my annual. Anyway, you’re deflecting; I could tell you were still awake from your heartbeat and your breathing.”

“That’s creepy,” Goro says, "just to be clear."

“So’s the way you basically stalked Akira in high school, but I’m not judging.”

“It _wasn’t_ \--”

Morgana presses a paw over Goro’s mouth, which is absolutely unhygienic. Goro jerks his head away and frantically rubs his sleeve over his mouth, wishing desperately for mouthwash. “What the _hell_?”

“I’ve always wanted to nose-boop someone. Everyone else loves to do it to me. Akira especially.”

“That was my _mouth_ , not my _nose_ , and that’s disgusting, for the record. You bury your litter with those paws.”

“My litter box is _very_ clean, for your information,” Morgana says archly, tail lashing as he settles himself more comfortably on Goro’s chest. Hurray. “Anyway, stop deflecting. Why are you still awake?”

“I’m actually part-cat myself,” Goro says sarcastically. “If I tell you, you’re just going to call me stupid again.”

“If I call you stupid,” Morgana says slowly, “it’s because you’re being stupid. Tell me anyway.”

The manifestation of humanity’s collective belief in hope sits purring on his chest, asking Goro to open himself up just a little, just enough. That heavy, cloying thing in his stomach, that kaleidoscope of butterflies, curls against his ribs. If Goro answers, if Goro gives a real answer, he’ll probably just tell Akira, and that’s--fine, he decides. If it’s Akira, just Akira, it’s fine.

What do the youth call this? “The mortifying ordeal of being known”?

“I am being stupid,” Goro says before continuing.

He doesn’t say everything--doesn’t even come close to saying everything. Just a little bit, just enough, so that by the time the sky outside is shifting to the shades of grey that herald dawn, Goro finally, finally, falls asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think I want to write Futaba forever, she's so much fun. Yeah, ADHD really is just Like That.
> 
> It's going to be (it should be) mostly uphill from here.


	16. Chapter 16

  


> **[Akira Kurusu added Goro Akechi to the chat The Boo-Boo Thieves]  
> ** **Futaba:** your cake eating skills suck  
>  **Ryuji:** how can somebody suck at eating cake  
>  **Futaba:** i don’t know!!!  
>  **Futaba:** i just wanted to say something insulting and petty  
>  **Futaba:** hi ◝(๑⁺д⁺๑)◞՞  
>  **Akechi:** Hello  
>  **Haru:** Has anyone thought about what we should do over summer break?  
>  **Ann:** BEACH  
>  **Ryuji:** BEACH  
>  **Futaba:** BEACH  
>  **Yusuke:** The beach would make for a pleasant change of scenery.  
>  **Futaba:** i swear to god if you buy more lobsters again im gonna  
>  **Makoto:** I guess the beach it is.  
>  **Akira:** you’re coming, right?  
>  **Akira:** Akechi  
>  **Akechi:** I don’t think I own swimwear at the moment.  
>  **Ann:** ’’’’’at the moment’’’’’  
>  **Ann:** lucky for YOU i know what’s in style

* * *

He goes from Marx to Hegel, from _The Holy Family_ to _The Phenomenology of the Spirit_. He’s charting a linear regression from materialism back through the cornerstone of idealism; Kant is probably next in line, and after that, who then? Berkeley and Hume?

It’s been a while since he was on top of the modern works. He hasn’t had the resources (much less the volition) to stay on top of book releases: internet access in juvenile hall had been limited and strictly monitored. He makes a note to look into any recent publications.

“You’re reading a lot of tough-looking stuff lately,” Mifune says. “Anything interesting?”

“The self-object-self dichotomy and the realization of the self through the perception of others,” Goro replies absently, wiping his fingers carefully on a napkin before turning a page. She brought cookies from a bakery she passed on her way; they’re crumbly and flavored strongly with black sesame. Goro took two for himself and set the rest aside for Ms Kitamura, who’s out picking up a prescription. He would have offered to go in her stead, but given the lack of kinship, it’s unlikely the hospital would release her order to him.

“Hooo boy,” Mifune says, her voice muffled from where she’s wandered between two shelves. “That sounds like a doozy. I don’t think my smarty pants are big enough to tackle that one.”

Goro feels his eyes glaze over the text, reading the words without really digesting, while Mifune hums her way through the shelves. Whatever her tune is, he doesn’t recognize it, but it sounds old and folksy. He finds that he’s reread the same paragraph at least five times without comprehending a single word when he snaps back to attention. Mifune stands across the counter from him, her hands pressed flat together in prayer.

“Yes, fine,” Goro sighs, knowing she’s going to insist on her definition of equal exchange and already preparing himself for another lecture on the secret wisdom of fortune-telling. “I’ll find you a book. Just give me a moment.”

“Thank you!” she calls after him. “My client’s a woman in her mid-thirties with a young daughter. She’s got...well, let’s just say she has family problems.”

He marks his place and wanders through the shelves, dragging an ungloved finger over the cracked and bumpy spines. Hiromi Kawakawa, Toshiki Okada, Hideo Furukawa--no, no, no. David Mitchell--and what’s his nonsense doing over here? Goro pulls that book from the shelf to file properly later, preferably with English fiction, more preferably in the garbage.

There-- _Out_ , by Natsuo Kirino. Goro tugs it off the shelf and flips through the pages as he carries it back to the counter. He hesitates only the slightest before handing it to her. “I hope it helps,” he says, and he means it.

* * *

  


> **???????:** I got your number from Akira  
>  **???????:** hope that’s okay  
>  **Goro:** Who is this?  
>  **???????:** Mifune  
>  **Goro:** Good evening. Is something wrong?  
>  **Mifune:** Sorry to bother you...  
>  **Mifune:** I really don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about this  
>  **Mifune:** the book you recommended is really….dark  
>  **Goro:** If you’d read Carrie through to its conclusion, you’d have been in for an even darker shock.  
>  **Mifune:** you read this kind of stuff normally?  
>  **Goro:** As opposed to what?  
>  **Mifune:** I don’t know. I guess I don’t really have a frame of reference.  
>  **Mifune:** I watched a lot of Sailor Moon as a kid  
>  **Mifune:** Sailor Moon got dark, but not...idk  
>  **Mifune:** this dark  
>  **Goro:** When I was young I watched a lot of Featherman  
>  **Goro:** when I was older I read Palahniuk  
>  **Goro:** I don’t think any of them really knew the way  
>  **Mifune:** I like when I know who to root for  
>  **Goro:** I never root for anyone  
>  **Goro:** but I always support Masako every time

* * *

His phone buzzes more frequently than he’s used to these days. It’s almost always senseless: the former Phantom Thieves, a cotillion of new adults just as meme-addicted as the rest of their generation. He’s not sure he can keep up with their sense of humor. He could have once, when he was riding the highs of celebrity and trying so hard to make himself seem _relevant_.

The idea that relevance is something that is itself irrelevant has been creeping up on him lately.

He’s in the stacks, carefully reshelving some of the newly rebound books, when the bells over the door ring. Ms Kitamura, from her place at the counter, calls out a welcome, and low voices respond back. Goro pushes the final volume into place on its shelf, dusts off his hands, and returns to the counter, where he stops in abrupt surprise.

In a strange reversal of roles, the customer who’d just come through the door is Akira, a slim, long-haired woman at his side. Akira smiles and lifts a hand in greeting. “Hey, Akechi.”

“Good afternoon,” Goro says as he grabs his gloves off the counter and pulls them back over his hands. He can feel Ms Kitamura peering up at him with the nosy interest of the elderly.

“Are these your friends, Goro-chan?” she asks. Akira’s eyes widen and he looks like he just swallowed something on accident. Goro feels the tips of his ears heat up and hurries to busy himself with cleaning off the back counter. He’s gotten so accustomed to the overly-familiar way she says his name that he’d nearly forgotten how embarrassing it is. Twenty years old and being addressed like a little girl.

“We know each other from high school,” Goro says shortly before fleeing to the back room to put the rice cooker away.

When he steps back out onto the sales floor, Akira is leaning on the counter, chatting amiably with Ms Kitamura, who looks charmed in turn. A toddler could twist her around its finger. Akira glances up at Goro and shoots him another easy smile.

“Your friend was just telling me about his coffee shop,” she says.

“It’s not _mine_ ,” Akira protests despite looking pleased at the implied ownership. “I just work live upstairs and work there part-time. The owner was my legal guardian when I did my second year of high school in the city.”

“Are you here with your girlfriend?” she asks.

“My girl--oh, Hifumi? No, she’s--” Akira looks like he wants to laugh but is too polite to leave people out of the joke. “She’s a friend. We play shogi sometimes--well, ‘play’ is a nice way of putting it. What’s my score now?” he calls out to Hifumi, who’s lost between the bookshelves.

“Thirteen victories,” her fluted voice calls back, “twenty-four impasses. Resignations: two hundred and seventy-nine.”

“She beats me a lot,” Akira summarizes, and Ms Kitamura laughs.

Akira’s eyes keep trailing back to Goro, like they’re doing now, and stopping, and staring. “What?” Goro asks, peevish.

Akira jolts. “Sorry,” he says, “I was just--” He lifts a finger and twirls it at the back of his neck. “What’s up with that?”

Goro reaches back to touch his hair where it’s pulled away from his neck with a piece of twine he’d dug out of one of the drawers. With the onset of summer, the heat has been climbing, and the store has only an old fan in place of an air conditioning unit. If it’s hot outside, it’s become increasingly stifling in here. “I was hot,” Goro summarizes.

“Okay,” Akira says, still looking at his hair with a perplexed expression on his face.

“You haven’t introduced me yet,” Hifumi says, walking up to the counter with breezy confidence with a small stack of books under her arm; in her free hand she’s carrying a slim, paperback volume Goro recognizes from the history section.

“You wandered off,” Akira points out to her. To Goro and Ms Kitamura he says, “This is Hifumi Togo. She’s my good-luck charm.”

Togo moves suddenly, yanking the paperback into the air and smacking Akira over the head with it; Akira jerks away and loses his balance, stumbles and falls to the floor. “I _told you_ not to call me that!” Togo protests, her face red with embarrassment.

It’s unexpected; it’s stupid. Harmless violence, and Akira is sitting on the floor looking up at Togo through misaligned glasses, every inch the opposite of confident, untouchable Joker, lain out by an abbreviated biography of Ryoma Sakamoto, and Goro finds himself suddenly and irrepressibly laughing. It comes too hard and too fast, making him grab for breaths between paroxysms of mirth. He can feel the others staring at him and he doesn’t care, he doesn’t know the last time he laughed like this, breathless and gasping--years ago, too long to remember.

When he manages to gather himself, wiping tears from his eyes, a smiling Ms Kitamura has finished ringing out Togo, who’s bowing over the counter and apologizing profusely. Goro has to lean on the counter to keep himself upright. When he looks at Akira, Akira meets his eyes with quiet levity.

“You looked like an idiot,” Goro tells him, the aftershocks of laughter leaking into his voice.

“Worth it,” Akira says, the look in his eyes warm and pleased.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My first-hand experience with Japanese literature begins and ends with a really terrible _Battle Royale_ translation I tried to read in high school. Huge thank-yous as always to Krist, who made this work.
> 
> Also a general thank-you to the Green brothers' series Crash Course on YouTube. I've been watching CrashCourse Philosphy so I can write Goro and sound like I know what I'm talking about.
> 
> I'm pretty set into this four-segments-per-chapter thing I've been doing since like chapter 2, but now I'm using text chats more. Does it feel like a cop-out? Asking honestly and looking for honest answers. I try to use them to drive something home but I'm not sure how it feels as a reader.
> 
> If you are good at puns, please DM me on tumblr @theexistentiallyqueer. I want to try rotating the PT group chat as a joke but I am BAD AT THIS and would love help. I will absolutely give shout-outs.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: Certain Characters are way, way smarter than I will ever be. I like to think I'm decently smart, but there's a conversation in this chapter that is just...look. Look, I'm sorry. If you're someone who's studied any of the topics I reference in that conversation, please just smile like you're humoring a very small, very determined child, and let me remain blissfully unaware of how stupid I probably actually sound.

When Goro was three, his mother lost him in a department store. A forgivable offense: department stores offer so many places to hide, and children that age are prone to wandering off without permission. He’d wandered himself into a gallery of mannequins, where a saleswoman had found him crying. Management paged out over the intercoms: shopping centers have a system for this, children being how they are. His mother had rushed her way to the management office, dropped herself down onto her knees, and begged the apology of everyone in the room in the most self-effacing way.

“I was so scared,” she said as she tucked him into bed, her chestnut eyes wide. “Mama was so scared. Please don’t ever scare me like that again.”

In first grade, he got a perfect score on his very first test. When she picked him up from school she didn’t lift him into the air and spin him around in the air the way she used to, because he was an elementary school boy now and that would be embarrassing, but she did grab his hands and jump up and down. Money was always tight, but she took him out for parfaits anyway. They stuffed themselves on strawberries and chocolate syrup and ice cream until they could barely move, and when they got home Goro crawled into bed to sleep in her arms, even though he was too old for it.

He didn’t know his grandparents, his aunts or his uncles if he had any. She spoke sparingly of his father. She was all he had: she was enough. If he got pitying looks from adults or heard the occasional supercilious remarks from his teachers, it was little matter. They didn’t see how her eyes would light up when he’d tease the meaning out of kanji above his reading level, or how she’d dance and sing to herself when doing the laundry, or how she’d always sneak a different treat into his school bag every day.

When he was in third grade, Goro was pulled from class and led to the principal’s office. Inside were the principal and vice-principal and two sharply dressed detectives, who shook his hand and looked down at him with very solemn pity in their eyes.

It turned out there were things Goro didn’t see either.

* * *

The next time he finds a heavy college brochure in his mail, he actually stops to read it. It looks...fine. He recognizes the name; the school has a not-unsubstantiated reputation. The list of programs offered is robust enough to not be easily dismissed. Yet the root problem still remains: continued education would be great, but for what purpose? The common understanding is that you’re supposed to have dreams to fulfill.

Goro’s dreams of late have been muddled. There are the ever-present horrors he won’t face when awake, so they creep into his mind when he’s asleep and put on shadow-puppet shows beneath his eyelids, but some nights they’re full of knotted-up feelings of contentedness and want, and when he wakes up he’s kicked off all his covers, too hot by half, and it feels like someone's lit bonfire in his belly, where it's smoking up his insides.

“They’re all upstairs,” the boss informs him when he gets to Leblanc later that day, studying him through his glasses, his look inscrutable. Goro freezes up and thaws slowly, reminding himself that if the daughter wanted him dead, the father would have had one of his “old friends” disappear him already. 

The boss jerks his chin up to nod at the stairs. “Tell them lunch is at one on the dot, and anyone who doesn’t pass has to pay me back for the meal.”

Crossing through the cafe to the stairs up to the attic feels like sailing through contested waters. When Goro reaches the base of the stairs, one foot on the bottommost step, he stops at the boss’s voice.

“Hey, kid,” the old man says behind him. “It’s good to have you back.”

Goro breathes in and exhales. “Thank you, sir,” he says quietly before ascending.

The fifth stair up creaks; he’d forgotten. He’s not surprised then when he reaches the summit to find the once-thieves, plus Takamaki’s friend, turned in their seats and peering with open curiosity to see who’s encroaching upon their domain.

Niijima turns to level a pointed look at Akira. “We’re supposed to be _studying_ ,” she says archly.

“Ann’s already here.” Akira points to Takamaki, who waves. Goro does not wave back. “What can one more hurt?”

“I already said my piece about Ann being here,” Niijima says. “This is a _study_ session. People who are not studying being here makes it a _hanging out_ session.”

“Akechi can study,” Akira says.

“I brought a book,” Goro says, gesturing to his bag. He brought two books, actually.

“I can study!” Takamaki says.

“You brought a _magazine_.”

“...It’s a really good magazine?”

“You’ve been reading parts of your own interview out loud for the last half an hour!” 

As the two bicker, Akira grabs a spare folding chair and sets it out between himself and Kitagawa to his left. Goro sits down and sets his bag on the table. At Akira’s right, Sakura ducks down to hide herself behind him, then peeks out, meeting his eyes before her gaze skitters away.

“...’lo,” she mumbles before yanking her headphones back over her ears.

Studying does happen, eventually, in parts and pieces. They fall into quiet reading and scratching in their notebooks while Goro reacquaints himself with _The Science of Logic_ , until someone’s phone goes off and they fall into sub-circles of comfortable conversations.

“What are you reading?” Kitagawa asks him at one point. Goro looks up, startled at being addressed, though he doesn’t know why at this point. He closes the book over a finger to hold his place, meeting Kitagawa’s uncanny dark eyes.

“Hegel’s _Greater Logic_ ,” he replies. “One of his seminal works of German idealism.”

“Idealism, you say,” Kitagawa muses. “I confess, that’s not a concept I’d have associated with Germans. Their art is quite dark.”

“It’s less idealism in the sense of forming or pursuing ideals, and more a school of thought that argues that meaning is derived from perception, and the concept of an immutable reality in an objective sense is inherently unknowable,” Goro explains.

“How fascinating. Yes, I can certainly see echoes of that in many German masterpieces. Friedrich’s _Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog_ , for example.” Kitagawa’s eyes light up as he leans forward. Goro leans away, his shoulder brushing against Akira’s, and tries to hold himself in some kind of uncomfortable equilibrium in the space allotted to him. “As the viewer, we witness a man standing before the mist, the contrast between lights and darks drawing us in. We see a man, and the man sees the fog, but are we truly seeing the man? Are we seeing the man’s view of himself as he looks upon the fog? What lurks within the fog, peering at the man through unseen eyes? Or is our view nothing more than a pale shadow of the vision Friedrich held within his mind as he touched brush to canvas? Do we see the painting as it is, or is it--”

“Hey!” The boss’s shout echoes up the stairs. “I thought I said lunch at one. Didn’t Akechi pass on my message?”

Every face in the room turns to look at him. Goro holds up his hands. “He said anyone who doesn’t pass owes him for the meal,” he says helpfully.

“ _Goddammit!_ ” Sakamoto exclaims.

* * *

Goro stays to help clean up the attic, a communal act that somehow turns into the group cleaning up the cafe after the boss leaves. Akira makes everyone a drink without being asked: their compensation for their labor, presumably. Once the bar and tables are clean, the others trickle out, one by one.

Sakura hovers at the door, halfway in and halfway out. “Akira…” she starts to say.

Akira flicks her gently in the forehead. She recoils and covers her forehead with her hands. It looks like a practiced, familiar exchange. “We’ll talk later,” he says. “Text me when you get home.”

“I’m not a little kid!” she protests.

“I worry anyway.” He says it like a promise.

Their exchange gives Goro the oddest sense of deja vu, like swallowing sticky noodles in lukewarm broth.

After Sakura leaves, the only other people left in the cafe are Takamaki and her brunette friend--Suzui, he’s learned her name is. She looks familiar, but Goro can’t place why. Takamaki is upending the contents of her oversized and likely overpriced purse onto one of the tables, tearing through the detritus and swearing ferociously under her breath in several languages while Suzui rubs circles into her back. Akira seems to give space. Goro can’t understand why; perhaps it has something to do with the supposedly sacred nature of female friendships, a thing he’s never understood.

Not that he’s ever understood friendship, period, but. He is, for probably the first time in his pathetic life, trying.

“So I tried reading one of the books by that guy,” Akira says, resting against the bar across from him. His mug is so hot steam wafts from it in waves, but he holds it cupped between both palms as if he doesn’t feel anything. “The German one everybody hates because communism?”

“Marx,” Goro says. “Yes, he’s very well-known for that. Which one did you read?”

“ _Capital_ was the only one the bookstore had. It was still pretty dense for me, but almost _more_ depressing than the Smith stuff they have us read in class?” Akira takes a sip of his still-steaming coffee; he must have an esophagus made of insulated titanium. “Smith feels soulless, but Marx just makes me angry.”

Goro remembers feeling similarly angry the first time he’d read Marx. There’s a difference between knowing the world is unfair and having the context of that injustice spelled out for you, piece by hungry piece. He’d been in middle school, and even at eleven, twelve, thirteen, children can see their futures being stolen from them. The adults spoke of getting into the right high school, the best college, the perfect job, while the news ran headline after headline about the stagnating job market, the collapsing bubble.

“Smith talks about the rules of economics as if they’re just that: rules,” Goro explains, tracing a finger along a grain in the wood. “Marx makes people uncomfortable because he reminds us that economics is a social science, not a natural one, and social sciences are studies of manmade rules, not universal ones. Manmade rules are much more fragile, and much more easily broken.”

Akira, leaning on the bar, takes another sip of his coffee. His hands curl around the mug with delicate pianist’s fingers, long and nimble. Goro finds himself staring and jerks his eyes away, just in time to catch Akira’s gaze. Akira’s mouth curls up in a wry smile, and Goro turns away to find Takamaki staring at him.

She’s close. Entirely too close. Goro leans as far away as is humanly possible without falling out of his seat.

“Huh,” she says to herself, because she’s obviously not addressing anyone else. “Yeah. Wow.”

“Ann,” Suzui says, tugging at Takamaki’s hand. “Come on, just let it go.”

“Gimme a second,” Takamaki says, keeping Suzui’s hand in a tight grip but not otherwise moving. “This is really interesting.”

Akira’s hand drops into the air between Takamaki’s eyes and their intent focus on Goro’s face; he snaps his fingers. Takamaki swivels to blink her big baby blue eyes at Akira. “Cut it out,” he warns, a note of something--irritation?--creeping into his voice.

“Oh, don’t think I’ve forgotten about you,” Takamaki warns. And then fishes a ticket out of her pocket to hand to him along with a sunny smile. “I found it! One ticket to Saturday’s game. You’re still coming, right?”

“I promised I would. Though I still don’t know why you always want me to.”

“I need moral support!”

“But you always say she’s going to win.”

“Yeah, but when the other team is doing too well, it freaks me out! That’s why I need moral support.”

“I appreciate you always coming to watch,” Suzui says. Watch what, Goro wonders, feeling like he’s listening to three people speak a foreign language. Arabic, probably. “Your support is appreciated, but I would hate for you to feel obligated.”

Akira changes expression faster than a pin drop, going from reluctant to enthusiastic in the space of a heartbeat as his face lights up with a smile. “Anything for you, Shiho. I’m your number one fan.”

Takamaki expresses her outrage the entire time it takes Suzui to drag her to the door. “You are NOT her number one fan, just so we’re absolutely clear!” she shouts more than says. “I’ll fight you!”

“You need to go to bed,” Suzui says, leading her out into the night. Goro finds himself respecting her.

When the door swings shut, Akira folds his arms on the bar and rests his head in the neat nest they provide. “I need a nap,” he says.

Goro finally takes a sip of his coffee, which is rich and delicious. “The cafe won’t close itself,” he says, smiling.

Akira shifts just enough to glare up at him without malice.

* * *

  


> **alibaba:** i heard you talking about hegel earlier  
>  **alibaba:** i’ve read him  
>  **Goro:** Is this Sakura?  
>  **alibaba:** NO  
>  **alibaba:** （；¬＿¬)  
>  **alibaba:** maybe  
>  **Goro:** Why are you contacting me through a secure channel?  
>  **alibaba:** i’m tricking my amygdala into not realizing i’m talking to you  
>  **Goro:** That makes no sense  
>  **alibaba:** YOU make no sense  
>  **alibaba:** anyway i wanted to ask  
>  **alibaba:** have you read hubert dreyfus’s alchemy & AI  
>  **Goro:** I haven’t, no.  
>  **Goro:** But I read Searle’s “Minds, Brains, and Programs” in the Mind’s I collection  
>  **alibaba:** good stuff  
>  **alibaba:** searle is cancelled tho  
>  **alibaba:** anyway they’re all obsessed w proving turing Wrong  
>  **alibaba:** & it got me thinking  
>  **alibaba:** maybe turing’s whole point is that “intelligent behavior” and “the self” are equal in both arguments  
>  **alibaba:** we’re a bunch of highly specialized evolved monkeys  
>  **alibaba:** the idea that “intelligent” behavior for whatever kind of objective quantifiable concept of intelligence is what sets the human brain apart from actual monkeys is 💩  
>  **alibaba:** i stand by gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences p strongly bc reasons  
>  **alibaba:** we don’t know what’s actually going on in their brains  
>  **Goro:** In other words, you’re saying Turing’s argument is upheld by the Hegelian school.  
>  **Goro:** If an object can only perceive itself through the perceptions of others, it follows that a sufficiently well-scripted computer program could, in turn, perceive itself as “intelligent” because the humans it interacts with do.  
>  **Goro:** Interesting food for thought.  
>  **alibaba:** TURING WAS GREAT  
>  **alibaba:** now tell me which feather ranger is your favorite  
>  **alibaba:** wait no let me guess  
>  **alibaba:** HOATZIN YELLOW  
>  **alibaba:** stinky  
>  **Goro:** Excuse me?  
>  **Goro:** Ossifrage Red, actually  
>  **alibaba:** ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh  
>  **alibaba:** that’s actually pretty metal

* * *

Goro stumbles out of bed when his alarm goes off and glares around at his room: the aforementioned bed, a bedside table bare but for his charging phone, a shuttered closet. He stumbles out into the living area and casts a dark eye over the low table, the TV on its rickety stand, and shuffles into the kitchen. Here he can dig out a canister of instant coffee and swirl a spoonful of it into a mugful of water microwaved to boiling. Everything in his kitchen, everything in his apartment, is bloodless.

He hates this apartment. It feels institutional. _I hate this apartment_ , he almost texts Sae on the phone he’d grabbed off his rickety nightstand without realizing, before quickly deleting the message.

After taking several measured sips of his coffee, Goro sets it down on the counter and picks up his phone again. _I have a question,_ he sends instead, and types his question out.

He’s in the middle of cleaning the sink when his phone buzzes in his pocket. After stripping his hands of the hundred-yen store gloves he’d purchased for this specific purpose, he scrubs away the filmy feeling latex always leaves behind from with soap and hot water and grabs his phone once his hands are dry. 

> **Goro:** How far do the trial funds extend?  
>  **Sae:** They’re not inconsiderable, given the contribution from the others.  
>  **Sae:** That said, they are a finite resource.  
>  **Sae:** Why do you ask?  
>  **Goro:** I’d like to make use of a portion, with your approval.

Sae does approve, with stipulations, which is how he winds up meeting her at the Nitori in Shibuya on Saturday at noon. Even in casual clothing she looks immaculate as always, not a hair out of place. Goro at least has managed to slowly replenish his much-diminished armoire over the past few months, and if he hasn’t managed to quite recapture the same degree of polish he’d once possessed, at least he can content himself with the knowledge that he looks better than, say, Sakamoto.

If only it wasn’t so infernally _hot_. He hates summer; it makes him feel sluggish and tired, and he can’t make excuses to himself to justify wearing gloves in temperatures in excess of thirty degrees.

“Thank you for agreeing,” he says with a pleasant smile that makes her lift one perfectly-trimmed eyebrow.

“Not at all,” she says, breezing past him through the automatic doors. “I count this as progress, all things considered, and I had in fact already budgeted for this. There’s a reason I only bought the bare essentials when I signed the lease on your apartment.”

Goro isn’t in the mood to be psychoanalyzed yet today, although he knows it’s coming. “I thought we’d start with the living room,” he says briskly, making a sharp turn down the aisle to the right.

An hour and a half and several thousand yen later, Goro has a copy of a receipt and a delivery slip for the following Friday. Sae folds her copy of the receipt into her wallet and turns to him with a sharp smile.

“Lunch, I think,” she says, leading the way through the crowded streets. Goro sighs and grudgingly follows. The restaurant she picks is, hilariously, one he remembers posting about on his long-deleted Instagram account. After they order Goro hurries to pull a slim copy of _Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime_ from his bag in the hopes that seeing him reading like a good penitent delinquent will stave off Sae’s inclination towards forcing him to talk about things he’d really rather not.

“I heard you’ve been spending quite a bit of time at Leblanc,” she says, because Sae can read signals and cares for them not one sliver of an iota. “I’m glad. Sojiro said that you joined the others while they were studying for their exams. I hope it proved edifying.”

She speaks with deliberate nonchalance, measuring every word and portioning it out with discrete care. He tries to focus on Kant waxing about the four humours; Goro’s choice of literature is, in this current moment, ironic.

“Makoto said you’d all be going to the beach…?” Sae continues.

Goro carefully sets his book down on the table and gives Sae one of his old TV smiles, too-wide, false and bright. “That remains to be seen.”

Sae quirks an eyebrow in return. “I see.”

As they eat she turns conversation to work, to the bookstore, even makes some halting attempts at asking what he’s been reading. Goro, with hesitation, begins to explain the discourse between rationalism and empiricism, until conversation eats itself up.

“Thank you for today,” he says as they go to leave, and he does mean it. Even if Sae grates on his every last nerve, even if she pushes too hard and too much. He has a receipt for several thousand yen worth of furniture pressed between the pages of his book and empty bookshelves arriving in a week that he can look forward to filling. He feels like he’s laboring to climb a tall, narrow staircase, and today he climbed another step. It’s...something.

“It was nothing,” Sae says, lifting a hand in farewell as she turns to go, then stops. “Akechi,” she says.

Goro turns back from where he’d been turning away. “Yes?” he asks tiredly.

Sae is Sae: she has the best poker face of them all. But Goro worked beside her long enough that he can see when something’s turning behind those dark measuring eyes.

“You missed out on enough normal experiences when you were a teenager," she says and smiles one of her rare, genuine smiles. “Have fun this summer.”

She’s caught him like a firefly in a mason jar, and he can’t say anything but to agree.

* * *

At night he closes his book and sets it with its bottom end parallel to the edge of the table, next to neat stacks of other books that have been piling on top of one another, waiting for a proper shelf to sit on. He checks to make sure the front door’s locked, clicks the lights off, and pads on quiet feet to his bedroom, to pull down the covers and crawl beneath them.

Sometimes sleep comes easier. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes he sits up at night thinking too long about too much that he can’t change, and sometimes he falls asleep and dreams of wants he won’t let himself face.

“Why do you love me?” Goro asked his mother once, when he was learning that he could put words together to form questions, and the world was big and grand and ripe for questioning.

“What a silly question!” she’d said, but she laughed, so he knew she didn’t mean it. “I love you because you were made for me, my little hero. What else is there?”

 _More_ , he’d thought, sitting at her funeral, small and full of too much fury that she'd left him without a word. _If you loved me,_ _there would be more._

It was an uncharitable thought, a selfish thought, but true in the way that all thoughts are true. He could never help it: his life has been one long Greek tragedy, and if every hero must have a fatal flaw, wrath has always been his.

It’s only that at some point in the last three years he’s realized how exhausting carrying all of that rage inside himself is. It’s exhausting even remembering it. Goro pulls the covers up over his head and lets sleep drag him down, down, down.

He dreams of quiet laughter, long fingers, of grey November skies. He dreams of something in his hand, warm contact that doesn’t make his skin spark and burn.

When he wakes in the morning, he doesn’t remember anything at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SURPRISE, this chapter is longer than normal. They might vary in length going forward. After my existential crisis last chapter over the use of chat conversations as substitution for prose, I realized using the four-scene structure I've maintained thus far is stupidly limiting when I can and want to do more.
> 
> The conversation between Goro and Futaba exists only to establish that they are smart people who will be talking about smart things going forward and I intend to never ever have to replicate writing that because......god I feel stupid just rereading it. I'm absolutely positive nothing I had them say has any basis in actual philosophy. I WRITE THIS FOR FUN. Spending more than two hours researching a thing I can't wrap my brain around crosses the line into the not-fun category.
> 
> I had to revisit Marx because I'd kind of made him A Thing earlier, but. I think no matter where your take of his politics falls, it's pretty impossible to dispute his analysis of economics reminds readers that economics is not, in fact, a physical science. I took an economics class in college and I remember hating it specifically because they talked about supply and demand like you could actually chart human behavior the same way you can chart Planck's constant (I googled that before I referenced it).
> 
> I didn't really get a chance to go into the specifics and I doubt I'll have the chance later, so: the obscene amount of money the Phantom Thieves managed to collect in the Metaverse was carefully doled out in parts to certain members (Yusuke, Ryuji, Akira) to help them pay for college, and in another part into a trust fund for Goro to pay his legal expenses and to help him establish himself after he was released. Sae is the legal administer of his trial funds. Considering she's the one that prosecuted Shido, that's probably illegal, but this is fanfiction and I don't care.
> 
> Nitori is basically the Japanese version of Ikea. I'm so dedicated to sourcing the fact that I'm writing Japanese characters that I'm writing about temperatures being in fucking celsius, for which non-Americans should be grateful. I'll give you the metric system, but measuring temperature by how it affects water is ridiculous.


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm rushing to get this posted before I have to get ready for work, so please forgive any and all errors. I'll fix them throughout the day!

_The meetings are always awkward, after._

_After they fought Akechi. After Akechi tried to kill them. After Haru refused to let the boy who killed her father die alone._

_When they were pushing their way through Sae’s palace, every planning session had palpable tension simmering in the air. Tension Akechi thought was hostility over a one-sided bargain but that the rest of them knew was the barely-restrained anxiety over a late-November deadline and the promise of Akira’s date with death. He felt sick to his stomach some days, something of his nerves showing just enough in his eyes that Sojiro would look at him with concern, wanting to ask but stopping himself. Akira wanted to tell him but knew at the same time he couldn’t. Everything, everything, depended on pulling the rug out from under Akechi, who thought he was standing on a marble floor._

_Akira thought the only times he saw glimpses of the real Akechi were when it was just the two of them, in Leblanc, at the jazz bar, at the arcade. Sometimes Akechi would open the shutters, just enough to let the light peak through, and Akira could glimpse the ghost of something real behind the glare reflecting off the windows._

_“I didn’t want to rely on anyone else,” he’d said, and Akira wanted to tell Akechi he could rely on him so badly he could taste the bullet with his name on it._

_This meeting is thankfully, finally over. The others are filtering out of the attic in a slow trickle. Akechi, always on the outside of the crowd, is either first down the stairs or last. Futaba grabs Morgana off the table the moment time is called and bolts for the door with the others following in their wake, leaving Akechi to stay fixed in his spot by the window, frozen in sullen silence, until everyone else has left._

_They're so close to taking Shido down._

_When Ann gets up to leave, heaving her purse over her shoulder, Akira catches her hand in his and squeezes it. She turns back to look at him, her eyebrows knit together in concern. “Hey,” Akira says, lacing their fingers together._

_Ann glances past him at Akechi, then looks back at Akira. Her face smooths out into a reassuring smile. “Hey,” she says, squeezing his hand back. “Everything’s gonna be okay, you know? One more push and then it’s wham, bam, home.”_

_The way she says it makes him think of the batting cages. Wind up the the bat to your shoulder, swing into the ball with a crack that splits the air and take off running._

_Once Ann’s gone Akira busies himself with cleaning up, putting the table and chairs away and pretending Akechi isn’t still leaning against the window, slim and dark and eating up all the gravity like a black hole. Akechi finally crosses the attic with slow, quiet strides, like he’s trying not to look every inch a wounded bear dragged from the trap. When he passes Akira, a whispers-breadth away, Akira lifts a hand to touch Akechi’s shoulder._

_It’s wrong. It’s all wrong. He can feel it in the way Akechi freezes, muscles locked in the act of not jerking away. Akira can’t feel or hear Akechi's pulse but knows somehow that it’s louder than a jackhammer, because Akira can hear his own blood rushing in his ears, and he knows they’re both the same. Even when Akechi tries to deny it, they’re both the same._

_Akira’s hand feels stuck like glue. Akechi is the one who pulls himself gently away._

_“Sorry,” Akira mumbles, his voice hoarse. Akechi, at the edge of the stairs, stops. For half a heartbeat Akira thinks he might say--something. Something that will make the shutters flutter back open, let the light inch back in. For half a heartbeat, Akira thinks he might be able to peer through the windows again._

_“Excuse me,” Akechi says before heading downstairs._

_Akira’s stomach is a peach pit, stone-hard with the promise of cyanide._

_They’re the same. He knows they’re the same. He knows it the way he knows up and down, north and south, hot and cold, wrong and right. They’re the same._

_But there’s always been a crack between them he’s never been able to bridge, and he can feel it yawning._

* * *

Shiho’s team wins, which doesn’t surprise Akira, but Ann always acts like she was just told a relative she never knew she had died and left her ten billion yen. When the clock runs out and the announcer calls the game, she launches to her feet, hollering loud enough to set a world record. Akira stands up more sedately to add to the applause, and when the stadium’s camera pans over the winning team to show Shiho, laughing and jostling against her teammates, Ann presses her fingers to her smiling mouth and bounces on her feet, her eyes shining.

Akira manages to brace himself just in time for Ann to jump at him, flinging her arms around his neck so she can cry into his shoulder. This happens every game, without fail. Akira pats her on the back and resists the familiar urge to tug on one of her ponytails.

“Did you see her?” Ann asks breathlessly through real tears. “You saw her, right? Wasn’t she amazing?”

“She was incredible,” Akira says with feeling, because it’s true. The Shiho he knew in high school was a milk-thin impression of a girl, hollowed out by pain. Akira knows what it’s like to climb your way out of a low point, fighting gravity every step of the way. Shiho wasn’t just at a low point: she’d gone from zero to rock bottom at the speed of an elevator in dead-drop. 

He knows Ann loves her, he knows the hows and the whys, and he loves that about her too. Ann doesn’t act like the world didn’t end when she thought it would when she celebrates so hard she cries because Shiho gets to take a trophy home. She’s seen the world end, or come near enough to it; she held the world’s hand in the back of an ambulance and prayed to any god who would listen when she didn’t believe in prayer. She cries at every victory because she knows every victory is one more thing Kamoshida was never able to take away.

If Akira gives her a hard time just to tease her, it’s only because he knows how easy it is for her to carry herself away, but he’ll be her shoulder to cry on every time.

“Better?” he asks, fishing for a tissue as she pulls away. She nods, hiccupping mid-laugh, which only makes her laugh harder.

She grabs the tissue and blows her nose loud enough to turn heads, but this is Ann: unwanted attention falls off of her like water.

“Better,” she says, and hiccups again between smiles.

“Good,” Akira says, reaching out to tug one of her ponytails. “Because there’s a really cute mid-fielder down there and I want to get her autograph.”

They meet Shiho outside the locker room, and when she walks through the door, Ann throws her arms around her neck and tries to kiss her. Shiho tries to duck away, face red and laughing, so Ann’s mouth lands on the side of her nose. It’s cute: Akira snaps a picture and sends it to the group chat.

> **Akira:** guess who’s going to nationals  
>  [ ...several people are typing… ]  
>  **Futaba:** surprise!!!!!!!  
>  **Futaba:** said no one ever  
>  **Haru:** Please give her my sincerest congratulations!  
>  **Makoto:** Mine as well.  
>  **Yusuke:** How magnificent… A victory for all of Japan.  
>  **Futaba:** a victory for THE GAYS of japan  
>  [ Futaba changed the chat name to Be Gay, Do Soccer Crimes ]  
>  **Ryuji:** can she get us a discount on tickets?  
>  **Makoto:** Honestly, Ryuji?  
>  **Ryuji:** im not skimping!  
>  **Ryuji:** i REALLY wanna go but like  
>  **Ryuji:** have you SEEN how much that shit costs?  
>  **Ryuji:** the beef bowl shop doesn’t pay jack  
>  **Akira:** I can help cover you if you can pay me back  
>  **Ryuji:** DUDE  
>  **Ryuji:** LIFESAVER  
>  [ Akechi: read, 18:37 ]

After they leave the stadium, after they drag Shiho away from photoshoots and autographs and her small but dedicated (and mostly female) gathering of fans, they wind up at a cheap diner in Shibuya. Shiho talks soccer strategy with uninhibited enthusiasm, and Ann gets herself drunk on non-alcoholic strawberry milkshakes topped with too much whipped cream. The conversation turns from soccer to Shiho’s teammates; Ann speculates on who’s dating whom and shares the latest celebrity gossip for Shiho’s eager ears.

Akira sits with his chin resting in the palm of his hand, watches their back-and-forth, rapidfire conversation, both of them oblivious to the rest of the world, and smiles. He feels like a third wheel, but he’s happy for them. They earned it.

* * *

Mishima has exams too. Akira knows this as an abstract concept, and also as a fact, because Mishima has been texting him a waterfall of complaints politely worded as pleas for help for the last two hours. Akira still doesn’t understand what Mishima thinks he can give other than moral support; the most Akira knows about computer programming is that words are what do the things, and most of them are in English. He sends Mishima a link to World Order’s music video for “Have a Nice Day,” because nothing drags Mishima out of an anxiety attack like a meme he absolutely hates.

Akira isn’t studying, because he’s reread all of his ugly notes and assignments already, and if they can’t prepare him for the probability of failure, nothing can.

Instead he’s playing chess with Akechi.

Akechi has always played white. He would always couch it as experience helping him guide less-practiced opponents, but Akira knows him well enough now to know that Akechi only ever wanted two things: to play the hero, and to have the upper hand. In the end he had to be the hero on their terms, not his, and he didn’t get the latter: Akira isn’t surprised when he offers to play black this game.

Akira’s improved since high school. It helps that Hifumi will devour any and every tabletop game placed in front of her like a very hungry dragon (the day she discovered Risk? Awful). He’s practiced with her, and he’s played games against himself. He’s even played against the computer on the stupid chess app on his phone that only gives him five moves per day unless he pays the anime mascot for extra. Akechi takes three of his pawns; Akira retaliates by taking one of his rooks. They line their captured casualties up on opposite sides of the board as Akira chases Akechi’s king, Akechi retreating from every check.

There’s a line between Akechi’s furrowed brows, his mouth twisted in frustration. Akira’s eyes keep tracking back to his face, something warm drumming against his ribcage. Akechi looks...kind of pissed off that Akira’s putting up a fight, and for some stupid reason that makes him happy.

Because it’s honest. Because he’s not pretending.

The bell over the door rings and Akira steps away, his smile easy as he shifts into barista mode. It’s only Futaba, hovering half in the door and peering at Akechi with nervous eyes.

“Hey,” Akira says, pushing himself away from the bar and heading to the stove, where he has a fresh pot of curry sitting over a low flame to keep its contents warm. “How was class?”

“Ffffiiiiiiiiiiine,” Futaba mumbles, finally stepping through the door and letting it swing shut behind her. They’ve both endured enough lectures from Sojiro about letting flies in. She tiptoes around Akechi to the back of the bar, where she can hide behind Akira.

Akira looks down at her. “I can’t get you lunch if you’re in my way.”

Futaba blows a lock of bright red hair out of her face and moves, huffing.

Akira pops open the rice cooker and scoops some rice out onto the plate, then grabs a ladle and layers curry over it. Futaba’s leapt into the chair at the near end of the bar, a spoon already in hand. “Curry!” she cheers when he sets her plate in front of her. She scoops up a spoonful and shoves it into her mouth, humming happily as she swallows.

He leaves her to it to grab two more plates and load them up, then goes back to the far end of the bar and slides one plate in front of Akechi, who blinks up at him, startled. 

“I don’t think you’ve had mine before?” Akira says, setting his plate down on his side of the counter and handing Akechi a spoon. Akechi takes it mutely.

“...I haven’t, no,” he finally says, lifting a spoon of steaming curry to his mouth and pursing his lips to blow on it. He takes a bite and swallows, the fruit in the curving line of his throat bobbing as he swallows. Akira props his chin on his hand and watches him curiously.

“Good?” Akira asks. Goro’s eyes cut up to him, the corner of his mouth curling up in a not-quite smile.

“Don’t get full of yourself,” he says, but there’s no bite behind it. Akira smiles.

Akechi’s phone goes off; he grabs at it to read whatever notification popped up on his screen, and then, incongruously, turns his head to glare at Futaba. Futaba’s looking back, but when Akechi meets her eyes, she squeaks and turns away. _Weird,_ Akira thinks, eating his curry as he studies the game board. He’s torn between advancing his queen or sacrificing one of his castles to capture Akechi’s bishop

Once both he and Akechi have finished eating, he picks up their plates and carries them to the sink to wash, grabbing Futaba’s licked-clean plate along the way. After he sets them in the drying rack, he dries his hands on a towel and walks casually up to Futaba to grab her phone out of her hand. She’s fast, but he’s faster.

“Hey!” Futaba yells, making a grab for her treasure, the Samsung Galaxy S10+ she bought on sale and has very thoroughly and efficiently jailbroken. 

“It’s a big brother’s right to snoop,” Akira says, thumbing through her apps to open Line and tap on the most recent conversation. “Who’s Hoatzin Yellow?”

Akechi slaps a palm down onto the counter and levels a glare at Futaba. “You did not,” he says.

Futaba’s gaze cuts from Akira, to Akechi, to the ceiling, and back around again. “Well...okay, in my defense, you REALLY give off Hoatzin Yellow vibes.”

“That is patently offensive.”

“So is your ranking of Featherman specials, but okay!”

* * *

Ohya is three drinks in and it’s anyone’s guess at this early point whether tonight will end at seven or if Lala will cut her off before she gets that far.

“I still can’t believe you have a sitting Diet member on speed dial,” she complains, levelling him with an accusing glare. “That’s information you owed me years ago.”

“Friends and family discount?”

“The friends and family discount would have been telling me that years ago.” Ohya buries her face in her arms. “I’m going to miss this deadline, and then I’m going to be homeless. Then you’ll be sorry.”

“You could write a fluff piece on the Minister of Agriculture?” he suggests. “The title could be, ‘Something Fishy in the Tuna Hatchery’.”

“I want another drink,” Ohya groans. “I deserve one on the house for that pun.”

“Lala ran to the store. Ask me again in…” Akira pauses to count down the time. “Three months and nine days?”

Ohya actually pulls her phone out of her pocket and opens her calendar. “Give me the date. I’ll pencil it in.”

Lala gets back, and Ohya gets her fourth round. She’s halfway through a rant about her new editor when Lala derails her. “How’s your partner these days?”

Ohya’s mouth snaps shut and opens again; she has the look of someone moving from play-acting to the real deal. Akira can see the shutters behind her eyes snick from open, to closed, to open again. “Kayo? Oh, she’s great. Can’t believe how far she’s come.”

He’d given Ohya the basic gist of it once, after extracting several sober sworn oaths to secrecy, in only the broadest of brushes and without using any buzzwords that would make her dig too hard into the things that really need to stay wrapped. Not that it matters; without Wakaba’s research there’s nothing to corroborate the story, and Shido’s conspiracy thoroughly torched that bridge in the chaos of its ringleader’s trial. He’d discussed it with the others first--with Makoto, Sae, and Futaba, mainly--but in the end, he’d felt like he owed Ohya something intangible for the price her partner had paid.

He knows it’s helped. Ohya brings him morsels of information from time to time. She has a contact at a major trading conglomerate doing research on the side, though she wouldn’t tell him either name; when he told Sae, she’d given him a thin-lipped smile and said she thought she knew who. It’s all expanded to a point where it’s grown so far beyond Akira’s reach that he doesn’t feel connected to it anymore, not in a visceral, actualized way. It’s not that he doesn’t care, because he does, but short of some _other_ god of whatever giving him a cool costume and a summon spirit with a top hat and literal stiletto heels, there’s not much he’s able to even do.

“I won’t pretend it’s going to be easy,” Sae had told him during the long and frustrating trial, “but I’m gunning for all of them with everything I’ve got. You’ve been through a lot, and your trust in the system is fractured. I understand that. I hope you’ll place your trust in me, at least, to not let you down.”

“She’s talking more,” Ohya says, her voice cutting through his thoughts. “She can string together some basic sentences--I mean we’re talking _basic_ -basic, but that’s better than it was even six months ago. She’s even starting to recognize and remember people. She can call her nurses by name now.”

A question swells up into the silence, a balloon growing with their every breath. Lala’s the one who pops it.

“Does she remember you?”

“Not yet,” Ohya says. _Not yet_ , as if the eventuality is a promise. Akira doesn’t know enough about cognitive psience and mental shutdowns to know if that’s a possibility; from what Futaba remembers of her mother’s research, the answer is murky, but pessimistic. The ego can’t sustain the self without the shadow, she’d theorized--or could it? If brains can recover from some traumatic injuries, could the shadow regrow itself like a lizard’s lost tail? Ohya says _not yet_ like she believes it, and he’s never known her to believe in something she couldn’t back up with cold, hard facts. 

Maybe all of the mysteries of the Metaverse are bigger than even Wakaba Isshiki had understood.

* * *

Akira knows a trap when he sees one. More specifically, he knows a trap when he’s told-not-asked to walk into one at 2 AM.

> **Ann:** hey! free tomorrow?  
>  **Akira:** i can be. why?  
>  **Ann:** we need to talk  
>  **Ann:** and you owe me cake  
>  **Akira:** do you really deserve cake, is the question  
>  **Ann:** LISTEN HERE YOU  
>  **Ann:** i deserve ALL of the cake  
>  **Akira:** what happens if i say no  
>  **Ann:** :)  
>  **Ann:** are you free the next day?

Which is how he finds himself sitting at a table in a kitschy cafe, ten minutes early while Ann is ten minutes late.

“Sorry!” she says breezily after she’s rushed through the door and dropped her bag onto the floor and herself into her seat. “Today’s shoot ran over. The goooood thing is--”

“Mika lost again?”

“Pffft. Mika who?” Ann flips one ponytail over her shoulder. “One of the photographers is going to introduce me to someone from Cav Empt! She thinks they’ll really like me.”

“That’s great,” Akira says and means it, even as he feels even the slightest bit envious. Which is stupid. _Ann is happy with what she’s doing,_ he tells himself. _Be happy for her_.

They browse the menus. Ann orders her cake, rich and decadent and oozing chocolate fudge; Akira’s content with coffee and a sandwich. They eat while Ann fills the quiet cafe with her bubby chatter and Akira pokes careful fun at her and all the people she mentions in return, the same easy back-and-forth they’ve shared for years. He doesn’t know how he’d live without her, honestly.

When Akira was in middle school, he had a girlfriend. It was the kind of juvenile relationship pubescent kids had. The farthest they ever got was occasionally holding hands or sharing an umbrella on the way home. Being around her made his palms sweat. They broke up after only three months. She’d told him, “Being with you feels like I’m stuck in a house of mirrors. I never know if what I’m seeing is real.”

Which. Okay. Maybe he’d tried too hard to be someone he wasn’t. He wore a mask for every occasion, even back then, even when he’d had no reason to.

Being with Ann had felt natural the way breathing was natural. She was funny without even trying; she lit up a room just by walking into it. She saw through his air of disaffection to the person he was underneath, measured his flaws against her own and never found him coming up wanting. 

He'd loved her, he really thought he did, and he wasn't wrong--he just didn't love her the _way_ he thought he did.

And that was fine, because she didn’t love him the way she thought she did either.

One of the waitresses stops by to clear away their empty dishes. Akira gives her the smile of a fellow food service worker, and Ann orders a sweet fruit tea. Through the window Akira can see the steady throng of people moving in the steady backs and forths of their own days.

“Remember when we broke up?” Ann says, completely out of nowhere.

Akira looks back at her, his eyebrows crawling up onto his forehead. “I remember when you dumped me for another woman,” he says and takes a sip of his coffee.

“Okay, that is so not what happened,” she protests.

“It’s kind of what happened,” he says.

Ann kicks him hard in the leg, probably crippling him for life. Akira hunches over, rubbing at his shin and looking at her with wounded-puppy eyes through his glasses. It’s futile and never works on her.

She purses her lips and twists a lock of hair around her finger, looking like she’s actually thinking about her words before she uses them.

“By the time--okay, fine-- _I_ broke up with you, we were already over.” She gives him a measured look. “You know we were.”

“I know,” he says. He came back to Tokyo after a year away and they tried to fit back together the way they used to be, but they were pieces to different puzzles by then and their shapes didn’t match. He’d seen Ann flutter around Shiho, a glittering hummingbird of a girl, and a part of him had known her story and his wasn’t _theirs_ anymore. He knew he felt the same.

“It’s funny… I hugged her on the school roof and told her I loved her, and then I went back to Leblanc and made out with you.” Her mouth curls up in a sheepish smile. “I really was there, for a while.”

Akira takes a sip of his coffee and watches a couple at one of the other tables, eating food off of each other’s plate and laughing. “We both were.”

“In two places at once,” she says, and laughs. “Sometimes you love two people, but one of them wins out in the end. It can happen to anyone. It happened to us”

He looks at her, the sunlight filtered through the window glinting off of her hair. “What?”

“Oh, Akira,” Ann says softly, her big blue eyes looking at him and seeing though everything. “You’re really smart, but you’re also an idiot. Even back then, in all of that mess, you liked Akechi. I pretended I didn’t notice, because it was so obvious and it made me crazy jealous, but it was always there. And here you are, three years later, and you still haven’t figured it out.”

There’s a sound in Akira’s ears like when you jump into a swimming pool and the water rushes past you. He thinks of the gentle lilt of Akechi’s voice, his ungloved fingers on the spine of a book. Seeing him laugh that day in the bookstore had felt like the world was righting itself after years of being off-kilter. Akira had kept staring at his hair where it was pulled away from the long column of his neck, and he didn’t know why it had fascinated him. When he walked through Leblanc’s front door after years of Akira wishing and wondering, there’d been something so shy and viciously vulnerable lurking behind his eyes that it made Akira’s heart lurch.

“Oh,” Akira says, pulling off his glasses so he can rub at his eyes. At some point between the bullet and the gun, he’d fallen for Akechi and never realized it. “Oh, wow. I’m usually way more self-aware than this. I mean, I knew that I liked you.”

Ann laughs. “I don’t know how to explain to you that compulsory heterosexuality is a thing.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes the real friend you made along the way is your bi ex who has to point out to you that you're also bi and thirsty for the absurdly pretty gay boy who tried to murder you once.


	19. Chapter 19

Akira needs to think. He’d told Ann as much, because it was true, and the more he thinks, the more details he starts to notice and the more questions he has.

For instance--if he likes Akechi, he’s into guys. That’s what logically follows, right? Not that he’s an expert on the topic but it seems unlikely that liking a specific person of a certain gender would be mutually exclusive from attraction to that gender as a whole. Which is when the awkward thought strikes him that while he’s always been aware that a lot of the women he’s friends with are beautiful, it hasn’t passed him by that Ryuji and Yusuke are good-looking too.

He texts Ann and lures her out with the promise of afternoon shopping, because he knows Ann is a sucker for two things: 1) sweets, and 2) having a guy carry her bags for her. He doesn’t mind sitting outside fitting rooms while she tries on twelve variations of the same outfit and poses each one for him to give his opinion so she can ignore it and settle on something else entirely. 

“So, you’re bi,” Akira says at one point when Ann’s standing in front of the fitting room mirrors, turned around to see how the latest dress fits her from behind.

“Yep,” Ann says cheerfully.

“And...I’m bi?” he asks.

“I mean, maybe?” Ann taps a finger to her chin and looks thoughtful. “...Probably? But that’s something you need to figure out on your own. The first cardinal rule about labels is that the only person who can tell you who you are is you.”

She hops down off of the platform to walk back over to the chair next to him, where she has more clothes draped over the back.

“Makes sense,” Akira says, pulling his phone from his pocket and unlocking it. Before he can get any further, Ann slaps it out of his hand.

“What are you doing?” she demands, hands on her hips and towering over him with her ungodly American genetics. “You better not have been about to google bisexuality 101.”

Akira had, admittedly, been about to google bisexuality 101.

“You work at a _drag bar_ ,” Ann reminds him. “How you don’t know this stuff already is beyond me! Start there.”

* * *

> **Akira:** I need to ask you something  
>  **Akira:** and i need you to be completely honest with me  
>  **Ryuji:** u okay dude?  
>  **Akira:** I’m good I just have a question  
>  **Ryuji:** ama  
>  **Akira:** do you ever happen to incidentally notice that some guys are just...really attractive?  
>  **Ryuji:** uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh  
>  **Ryuji:** no?  
>  **Ryuji:** i mean i know some dudes are good looking  
>  **Ryuji:** but it’s not something i ever rly think abt?  
>  **Ryuji:** why’d u ask?  
>  **Akira:** so it turns out I’m bisexual  
>  **Ryuji:** what  
>  **Akira:** or something  
>  **Ryuji:** wait WHAT  
>  **Akira:** yeah  
>  **Ryuji:** since when?????  
>  **Akira:** since a while, apparently  
>  **Akira:** three years at least  
>  **Ryuji:** oh  
>  **Ryuji:** well uhhhh  
>  **Ryuji:** congratulations???  
>  **Akira:** thanks I think  
>  **Ryuji:** wait  
>  **Ryuji:** waaaaaaaait wait wait  
>  **Ryuji:** IS THIS ABOUT AKECHI

* * *

When Akira gets home from class Akechi is in his usual seat, second from the door where the afternoon sunlight can fall in and catch the flecks of honey in his russet-brown hair. Akira meets his eyes and Akechi smiles slightly, just the slightest curl at the edge of his lips; Akira’s heart flips over in his chest and sets off on a marathon.

“Good afternoon,” Akechi says politely.

“Uh,” Akira says like an ineloquent idiot. “Hey.”

“Perfect timing,” Sojiro says before Akira can so much as drop his bag off upstairs. Morgana pokes his head out of the bag to peer around. “I need to run to the store. I know you don’t work until later, but can you mind the place while I’m gone?”

He’s already hanging up his apron and settling his hat over his balding head like he knows the answer. He does know the answer, because _no_ is not a word that exists in Akira’s vocabulary.

“Sure,” Akira says, tugging his bag from his shoulder and holding it to the floor so Morgana can jump out. Morgana pauses to clean himself then bolts up the stairs, crowing about naptime. “Half hour coverage means I get to start half an hour late, right?”

The edge of Sojiro’s mouth twitches in a suppressed smile. “Don’t push your luck.”

 _My luck is great_ , Akira almost says back just as Sojiro walks out the door, leaving him alone with the very guy he’s studiously spent the last several days trying not to think about. He drops his bag behind the counter and pulls an apron on over his clothes, then turns around to survey the cafe, and oh, right, Akechi.

Akechi looks bemused, or amused, or some other kind of mused. He holds his cup up with graceful fingers that can handle a ballpoint pen, a lightsaber, or a gun. “Could I get a refill?”

“Sure.” Akira takes his cup and drops it into the sink, then grabs a clean one and sets to work. He focuses every measurable ounce of his attention into the actions of grabbing a canister off the shelves, measuring the beans, grinding them out, heating the water. He pours the water over the beans in delicate, tightening circles, imagining that he’s mapping out the path through the center of a labyrinth no one will wander through.

When he’s finished he sets the cup in front of Akechi and moves back down the bar to clean up. The TV is playing old game show reruns, so once the dishes are clean, Akira grabs the remote and changes the channel to something less irritating and settles on a special on textile production. The guest is incongruous with bleached-blonde hair and piercings, but he sure knows a lot about weaving.

Akira returns to Akechi’s end of the bar like a magnet pointing north. “How is it?” he asks, gesturing at Akechi’s coffee.

Akechi lifts the cup to his mouth and takes a sip. Akira can’t help but be aware of everything: the way Akechi’s fingers curl around the coffee cup, how he purses his lips against the cup’s rim, the way the muscles in his throat shift beneath his skin as he swallows. Akira can feel the scalding burn of coffee sliding down his own throat to sit in his belly, warm and bubbling.

“I think this is probably the best coffee I’ve ever had,” Akechi says. His eyes are bright for once, the shadows hiding. “Did you do something different this time?”

“Not really,” Akira says as he moves away. He didn’t do anything different this time, only he’d been thinking of the curve of Akechi’s mouth, the soft pale curve of his lips, the dark carmine of his eyes. The phrase _made with love_ leaps into his mind out of absolutely nowhere and with absolutely no instigation.

“How’s work?” Akira asks for something to ask, for something to fill up the air around him that feels weighed down by too much one-sided awkwardness.

When he looks back at Akechi, he sees the subtle curve of his mouth as he speaks, the smallest flash of tongue between teeth, and hurries to yank his gaze away to something less--objectifying.

* * *

Lala’s _Welcome Love_ sign has a whole layer of extra meaning, now that Akira’s looking at it with revelatory eyes. In retrospect, three years working at a drag bar without realizing he’s attracted to men is...okay, yeah, it’s kind of funny.

It’s early evening, and the regulars haven’t yet started to trickle in. “There’s a guy I like,” he tells Lala; he hopes he sounds smooth and casual about it and not like his ex had to spell it out for him in small, simple words.

Lala raises one well-manicured eyebrow and studies him with her usual inscrutable gaze. “Do you, now?”

“Uh,” Akira says, very not-smooth. “Yeah.”

“Sounds to me like this is a first for you.” She smiles. “Take a seat. I’ll grab you a bite.”

Oh, boy. It’s going to be one of _those_ conversations. Akira makes himself a Roy Rogers and settles himself in one of the high top chairs. He hasn’t been on this side of the bar for a while; no need to come here on off days to tap Ohya for information when he doesn’t have a world to save.

Lala returns from the tiny back kitchen with lumpy pre-frozen potstickers and drops it in front of him, then fishes around under the bar for the soy sauce and thunks it down. She fishes a cigar out of her case, cuts the cap, and lights it to take a heavy drag. Akira uses the time to stuff an entire dumpling in his mouth.

“Okay,” she says once Akira’s chewed and swallowed and washed it all down with soda and grenadine. “Go on. Let’s hear the details.”

The details. Right. God. Where to start? _Hey, Lala-san, when I was in high school a god installed an app on my phone that let me access the manifestation of the human subconscious, and my friends and I decided to play our own choose your own adventure game. Then it turned out there was this other guy with the same app, and he tried to kill me twice. We worked that out, but now I can’t stop thinking about what it would be like to kiss him._

Lala smiles, the wrinkles around her eyes crinkle up in the corners, the glitter in her eyeshadow winking at the lights. “This is a no-judgement zone, kid,” she says, gentle in her no-nonsense way. 

It’s only when she says that that Akira realizes there’s a tightness in his chest he hadn’t realized had been knotting itself there. Talking about it with his Ann or Ryuji is one thing; if Akira can throw the rest of the world only so far, he knows that his friends, the once-Phantom Thieves of Hearts, will carry him one-two-three and all the way to home. Talking to someone else, even if that someone else is his drag queen boss of three years, is different.

“When I was in high school, there was this guy,” Akira says, starting at genesis knowing Cain killed Abel. “We disagreed a lot, about a lot of things. It wasn’t always--”

Healthy? Akechi drew a gun and pressed its barrel to the forehead of Akira’s cognitive double and laughed about it. Akechi fought all of them nearly to the point of defeat, breaking all the while. Murder was definitely attempted, and something about the whisper-promise of danger had always made Akira’s insides fizz. 

His tongue feels heavy in his mouth. “It was complicated,” he summarizes. “It’s still complicated. But…”

But it wasn’t that, or it wasn’t only that: it was the gleam in his eye when there was an argument at hand or a puzzle to solve, the razor-edge curve of one of his rare, real smiles. It was fine fingers curled around a chess piece, tipping Akira’s king flat in checkmate. It was seeing all of the ugly anger Akira keeps so tightly leashed spill out into the open, like looking into a dark mirror. It was the elusive feeling of fate, the impossibility of all the wheels lining up in perfect harmony.

“But you don’t know how to process it,” Lala says. When Akira blinks up at her, she’s smiling.

He swallows a mouthful of his drink around the lump in his throat and smiles wryly back. “Basically.”

“Kid, no one’s equipped to deal with a crisis of sexuality. They don’t pass the rulebook around during puberty the way they should.” She takes a final drag of her cigar before stubbing it out in an ashtray and pouring herself a glass of top-shelf gin. The ice in her glass catches the light and casts off rainbows. “You’re smarter than most, in more ways than one. You’ll work through it just fine. You think this boy you like is into men?”

Akira thinks about it. He’s never had reason to wonder before now, and he’s not sure why, but the answer seems obvious. “Pretty sure.”

“Well,” Lala says, holding her glass out for him to knock his against. “Cheers to that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is brought to you by Akira being a thirsty bi disaster and Ann reminding you to listen to your queer elders.
> 
> Also, nobody caught the Mitsuru reference last chapter. My heart is broken. Shame shame shame.


	20. Chapter 20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shrike hit over 400 kudos this week. I really don't have the words to describe how much this means to me. I was diagnosed with ADHD last spring, and now that I'm on medication, this is the first actual long-term work I've ever worked on. I feel like I'm really developing as a writer with each chapter I post. I feel confident in myself as a writer for the first time in the thirty years of my life.
> 
> Thank you, thank you, thank you for your support. I write this for me. That you love it too means the world to the moon and back.

> **Makoto:** So it’s settled, then.  
>  **Makoto:** The weekend of the 15th works for everyone?  
>  **Ryuji:** all good w me  
>  **Futaba:** locked and loaded!!!  
>  **Haru:** My schedule is clear.  
>  **Yusuke:** Thank you for the gracious offer to host us, Haru.  
>  **Haru:** You’re welcome! It’s my pleasure.  
>  **Makoto:** Excellent. I’ll rent the van, then.  
>  **Makoto:** Akechi, are you coming?  
>  **Akechi:** I hadn’t decided yet  
>  **Futaba:** COME OOOOOOON  
>  **Futaba:** we need an even number for gendered beach volleyball!  
>  **Futaba:** mona-mona doesn’t count  
>  **Ryuji:** yeah dude cmon  
>  **Ryuji:** what do u have to lose  
>  **Haru:** Let’s make this a summer to remember!  
>  **Akira:** we’d all really like it if you came

* * *

“The beach?” Ms Kitamura says. “My, that sounds wonderful.”

She has to speak up for her reedy voice to be heard over the whirring of the old, monstrously oversized fan that’s taken up residence by the counter, the store’s only concession to the growing summer heat. Summer is her slow season, and as stifling as it is in the shop, it’s little wonder why.

“I haven’t been to the beach since my son was a boy,” she continues. “So many memories… Yes, of course you can go. Shoo, shoo. Building fond memories is important before you become an adult.”

Goro bites his tongue from pointing out he’s already an adult, technically speaking. He’s twenty-one. He can vote and drink legally, if he was so inclined. That he’s not following the proscribed path into adulthood is completely incidental.

He doesn’t know why he brought it up, only he keeps looking at the group chat and thinking of what Sae said. _You missed out on enough normal experiences when you were a teenager. Have fun this summer_.

One weekend at a private beach house with the Phantom Thieves of Hearts. Goro has had nightmares with that setup (he’s had dreams with that setup too). On its face it sounds like the kind of hallucination that accompanies a bad case of food poisoning. They open the circle of their friendship to make space for him so easily, as if his right to be there is a given.

He can’t even remember the last time he’s been to the beach. Possibly it was an enrichment activity when he was in the group homes and their budget could excuse the expense, or he hasn’t been since his mother was alive. After all, what sort of lonely, friendless teenager goes to the beach alone?

At that age he had other goals.

 _We’d all really like it if you came_.

He bought a bike last week, and he rode it to work today. He’s even been waking up in the mornings to go cycling. By the time he reaches back home by the end of his route he’s shaky and breathless, but it feels good to be doing something physical with his body again. He doesn’t know when he last did something just for the purpose of enjoying it, but he’s finding that he relishes the activity.

There’s something sweet about the ache in his muscles as he pedals his way to the top of a hill. There’s something unquantifiably pleasurable about being awake to watch the sun rise and spill color across the sky. Not that aesthetic has ever been a school of philosophy Goro has studied with any degree of interest, but if anything’s to be called beautiful surely a sunrise is.

He finds himself posed a question within his own mind: in the absence of revenge and standing on a precipice with one step in a nebulous future and another in the haunted past, what is it that he wants to live for? That he wants to live--to be alive, to exist, to breathe in the air in the present moment--is a given variable in the equation.

 _You’re alive_ , Futaba had said. _You don’t get to waste it._

That the road Goro has walked is paved with bodies isn’t a question; that it feels like there’s a destination unfurling in front of him in place of an impasse is.

* * *

> **Goro:** I’ll join you all, if that’s alright  
>  **Ryuji:** sweet!  
>  **Akira:** why wouldn’t it be?  
>  **Ann:** the more the merrier!  
>  **Futaba:** we’re still gonna destroy you guys at beach volleyball  
>  **Futaba:** we have the ULTIMATE WEAPON:  
>  **Futaba:** a post-apocalyptic lesbian  
>  **Makoto:** Will you stop?  
>  **Futaba:** can’t won’t not possible  
>  **Akira:** you can get the time off work right?  
>  **Goro:** Yes, I already cleared it with Ms Kitamura. It won’t be an issue.  
>  **Makoto:** That reminds me, Akira said you work at a shop in Jinbocho. Which one is it?  
>  **Goro:** Bookworms  
>  **Makoto:** I’ve been there. The old woman who owns it is very nice.  
>  **Goro:** She is  
>  **Ann:** have you been to the beach before?  
>  **Goro:** Not for a while

* * *

The problem is that Goro neglected to take into account the fact that a group chat is inherently a social space, and any information shared therein is privy to all members.

And now Ann Takamaki is in the bookstore.

“Hey!” she says the moment she spots him. “I just finished a shoot nearby so I thought I’d swing by and check this place out.”

 _Please leave_ , Goro does not say.

She bows to Ms Kitamura. “Hello! I’m Ann Takamaki. I’m friends with this guy here.”

“My,” Ms Kitamura says before Goro can stop her, “you have so many friends, Goro-chan.”

 _We aren't_ _friends_ , Goro does not say.

Takamaki’s big blue eyes grow wider. Her mouth falls open and she mimes the words _Goro-chan_ in silent surprise; Goro quietly bids farewell to any shred of dignity he’s managed to scrape together, because Takamaki has the biggest mouth of anyone he’s ever met. He tries to ignore her as openly and rudely as he can until she leaves, but she just leans on the counter and chatters amiably with Ms Kitamura.

Eventually she sidles up to him to peer down at his crossword puzzle. “You misspelled _hierarchy_. The I comes before the E.”

Goro closes the crossword book and gives her a false smile. “How can I help you?”

“Oh, right, I almost forgot--” Takamaki taps a finger against her chin and gives him a winning smile. “You said you didn’t have a swimsuit, so I thought I’d offer my help shopping for one. It is the beach, after all. You can’t just show up not ready for swimming.”

 _And I figured you’d be much easier to corner here than anywhere else_ goes left unsaid. She's more cunning than she lets on, and simultaneously the worst liar and the best actor he’s ever met.

“I’m at work,” Goro says, gesturing pointedly at the store, “as you can see. I’ll be here through the evening. But thank you for the offer.”

But of course, of course, Ms Kitamura is there with her quiet elderly forbearance and complete inability to read the air. “It’s early still,” she says. “I don’t mind if you step out with your friend for a long lunch. I might just close up early, slow as it is.”

Goro turns to level a look at Ms Kitamura he hopes conveys the depth to which he doesn’t want to be strong-armed into _bonding time_ with Ann Takamaki; Ms Kitamura smiles back, innocently unwitting or deliberately oblivious. Goro resigned himself to the failings of his ability to actually read other people when seven teenagers and a cat outwitted both him and an entire criminal conspiracy.

He presses thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose and resigns himself to his fate.

* * *

They wind up at Marunouchi Kitte because it’s close by. Takamaki tries to wheedle him into trying on swimwear like he’s one of her runway model colleagues; Goro counters with a very patronizing explanation that men’s clothes often fit the same for most standard sizes, and anyway he has a good eye for what will fit and what won’t. Takamaki reacts to that with the petulant pout of a child and resigns herself to only being able to criticize the muted colors he picks out and trying to push him towards something brighter.

Maybe he would have jumped at the opportunity to show off, once. But then again--different priorities then, different priorities now. Being an idol had been fun for about two whole months before the constant surgical fixation on his life had grown taxing. 

> **Akira:** what’re you up to?  
>  **Goro:** Your ex girlfriend is trying to badger me into trying on swimsuits  
>  **Akira:** What?  
>  **Goro:** That’s the question I’ve been asking myself for the last hour  
>  **Akira:** no, seriously, what?  
>  **Goro:** I did just say

“I still think you should go with the maple red,” she complains while he’s standing in line to ring out. “It’d bring out your eyes.”

“This is good enough,” Goro says, stepping up to the register to pay. Takamaki lets out a little sigh.

Outside Goro gives her another half-smile. “Thank you for your help,” he says, ready for battle. “I should really get going now.”

“Now?” she asks, looking at him with kicked-puppy eyes. “But what about lunch? What about crepes?”

Goro brings out his best (metaphorical) guns. He winds up at Fruitsparlour with Takamaki anyway. 

“I’m really feeling more parfait than crepe, now that we’re here,” she says. “This is about the only place you can get them low-calorie and fat free and they’re still just as good as the regular.”

The waitress takes their orders. “So, Goro-kun--is it okay if I call you Goro-kun?”

 _No_ , Goro thinks while seeing futility staring back into his face. “If you insist,” he says instead.

Takamaki smiles and studies him with measured blue eyes that see too much. “I know you basically just tolerate other people,” she says, “and that’s fine! Everybody has a different way of relating to other people. But sometimes I get the feeling you dislike me specifically, and I hope it’s not anything I did.”

How does she live like this? Goro wonders. Does she just casually walk into every room and upset the air by pointing out the things everyone buries beneath false smiles and sullen silences? How does she breathe air heavier than the carbon on Jupiter and smile, and smile, and smile?

There are so many things he could say, looking back into her earnest sky eyes. _I don’t hate you, but you make me feel like I can’t breathe_ , he thinks. He doesn’t understand her aggressive cheerfulness, her hawkish affection, her impetuous care.

“Is it because I dated Akira?” she continues. “Because that’s water under the bridge now.”

Goro blinks at her. “Why would that matter to me?”

Takamaki smiles, and he doesn’t like the knowing edge to it. “Dunno,” she says. “Call it woman’s intuition, maybe.”

As if such a thing existed. Women are no more inherently inclined than men to fits of psychoanalysis: they’re only more predisposed to needing to watch every step and every word in order to survive, and in that respect Goro is no different. Growing up in the system doesn’t lend itself towards escaping violence.

“I don’t dislike you,” he says carefully, his eyes tracing the lines of the latte art the waitress drew in the foam of his drink. “I don’t understand you, that’s all.”

Takamaki laughs. “Lucky for you I speak four languages,” she says, and then holds out her hand. “Here’s to understanding?”

Goro studies her warily but doesn’t take her hand. Instead of taking offense, Takamaki grabs for the wrapper from his straw and braids it together with her own. When she’s finished she holds it out to him, beaming.

That he accepts.

“One more thing,” she says, smiling sweetly. “If I’m going to call you Goro-kun, then you have to call me Ann.”

Goro dips his eyes and takes a sip of his coffee. “I’ll think about it,” he says.

Ann laughs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beach episode? Beach episode.
> 
> Every use of first names in this fic is 200% deliberate, and yes this goes back like five chapters at the very least.


	21. Chapter 21

_Goro Akechi used to dazzle the masses once._

_Perhaps that’s an unfair thought. He certainly still dazzles the masses in some ways--the media, for instance, can’t stop their twenty-four hour circus performance over his illegitimacy and the Shido scandal--but beneath all of it, he’s just a boy._

_A boy with a body count, Sae thinks, but who’s counting?_

_There’s a certain cognitive dissonance that comes with being a steward of the law and finding out your colleague had a side job as a hitman. That the only aspect setting that colleague apart from others was the fact that he was in his third year of high school only underscored the sheer ludicrousness of the situation. Sae is still wrapping her mind around the psychopomp aspect of the whole affair. Makoto’s walked her through it at least three times, and Sae still has questions._

_Security in the juvenile detention center is as security is in those places. Sae submits herself to electronic scans, to being patted down by a female guard, to having her purse upturned and its contents meticulously picked through like a bird in a rice paddy rich in worms. They let her take her folio and a pen but make her leave her bag in the warden’s office. The visiting room is clinical in its attire, the walls painted a dull white, the chairs minimalist pieces of hard plastic on wire legs. Sae takes a seat and tucks her legs beneath her chair like she’s at a five-star restaurant; the first lesson she learned as a woman in a male-dominated profession was that poise was as much of a weapon as brass knuckles._

_That’s the secret to her success: in the face of a world determined to tear you down, you stand up taller than any of them can reach. It helps that she has a natural advantage in that arena._

_An alarm buzzes and the door on the other side of the room opens. A sullen-eyed Goro Akechi steps into the room and takes his seat across from her, the clear acrylic sheet dividing them. He eyes her through it but says nothing._

_She’d had letters in her bag, confiscated by the guards, letters she’d like to have been able to pass on. Letters in Makoto’s hand, and Akira’s, and others as well. She thinks a quiet word would do Akechi a world of good, but someone in the correctional system is a loose tooth of the Shido conspiracy, and petty if nothing else._

_Sae rifles through her file to pull out a piece of paper and slide it through a slat in the divider. “I was able to negotiate your sentence down to three years, with the possibility of early release depending on behavior.”_

_Akechi takes the proffered paper and skims over it with seeming indifference. There’s something tightly wound and almost feral in the shadows of his face._

_“I expect good behavior,” Sae clarifies, her voice a quiet lash._

_The needlepoint-corner of Akechi’s mouth curls upwards. “I’ve always been on my best,” he says, his voice laced with sharp-edged sarcasm._

_Sae meets his gaze with level eyes. She knows he does well in the detention center’s mandatory and meager classes. She’s told he spends his idle time playing sudoku and doing crossword puzzles and steadfastly and stubbornly refusing to connect with anyone around him._

_She sees a boy with loneliness like a knife. A boy whose loneliness could be mitigated by the reminder the outside world still wants him, if only the warden and the director above him didn’t have sticks so firmly driven up their own asses. Sae’s tried everything she can think of to scare them into having a shred of humanity, but she doesn’t have the pull she used to since she left the SIU._

_“I’ll be back in a month,” she promises when she leaves. If he’s been let down by every adult in his life, Sae will break the pattern. Not because she owes it to him, even if she does (and she does)._

_But because whatever mistakes he’s made, he deserves it._

* * *

The agreed-upon meet-up time was 11:00 AM at Hachiko-guchi, just outside Shibuya Station. Makoto has the van parallel parked on a side street five blocks away, with ¥500 worth of time on the parking meter just to be safe. She’s known Yusuke and Ann long enough to know their concept of time is flawed, at its best.

Akira is the first to arrive, with Futaba in tow. He’s taking long draws from a thermos of coffee while Morgana juts his head out of his bag to look around. Akira might be bad with mornings, but he’s the most punctual person Makoto’s ever met.

Futaba curls up at the base of the Hachiko statue, pulls her headphones over her ears, and falls asleep. Soon Haru joins them, pulling a mint green suitcase behind her and smelling sweetly of peonies. Haru rubs her hands together and complains of the morning chill (it’s 25 degrees and climbing) to make a show before grabbing Makoto’s right hand with her left and beaming like she’s the best criminal mastermind in the world (it’s cute).

Makoto catches Akira’s eye; Akira smiles his lopsided smile. Makoto feels her cheeks burn and hurries to look at anything else. Hachiko. Hachiko is cute. Not as cute as Buchimaru, but definitely cute.

Akira held Ann’s hand through her entire coming out, he can do Makoto the courtesy of giving her her space through hers.

The next person to show up is Akechi, because of course it is. Makoto doesn’t know why having him see her holding hands with a girl should embarrass her, but it does. Maybe it’s something about how around all but the tiniest handful of people (Makoto counts up to ten), she has to be seen as one hundred percent in control. Ready to be the mom friend. Ready to take responsibility for someone else. Pack up the bags, put away the dishes, Makoto is there with firm guidance and a steady hand.

It’s not that she doesn’t trust Akechi. She does trust him, which is a strange thing to feel about someone who once tried to kill you and your best friend, but true. There’s something about facing down death against an actual living god that breeds the belief in someone else’s decency. They all had the chance to fall behind, to take the other side: Akechi stood fast with the rest of them. But trust isn’t the same thing as faith or safety. When Akechi is there Makoto feels the way she does around her classmates, her sister’s colleagues, her coworkers: people Makoto has to present a certain face to because her real face isn’t stiff enough. A persona, if you will.

There’s also the fact that Akechi was rude to Haru, and if he talks to her like that again Makoto will probably (definitely) hit him.

Akira’s falling in to speaking animatedly with Akechi, making gestures in the air as he talks. Akechi laughs quietly at something Akira says. Akira spins the cap of his thermos in his hand like he’s a magician doing tricks and flips it upside-down, making it into a cup, and he pours out a small capful of coffee for Akechi to drink. Akechi tries not to look as pleased as he obviously is at how good the coffee tastes.

They’re so obvious it would probably make a spectator vomit, but Makoto doesn’t have the room to judge spectators because she wasn’t one herself until Haru clued her in.

( _Haru erupts into giggles from her seat on the couch. They’re side-by-side on the couch after dinner while a cheesy drama plays out on TV, something safe and easy to watch because it doesn’t require digestion._

_“What’s so funny?” she says._

_“Akira,” Haru starts, and then laughs again like a windchime. “Akira just texted me to ask what being bisexual feels like.”_

_There are a lot of moments where Makoto feels like she’s standing on solid ground and someone yanks the rug out from under her. Anyone talking about sexuality is one of those times, which flips her stomach over and sets it off running. Haru’s so open about it, something Makoto loves about her and respects in equal measure. “What does it feel like?” Makoto asks, anxious all over. All she knows is that she likes Haru immensely and the word lesbian scares her more than the prospect of a bad grade._

_Haru has been out since they graduated high school._

_Haru pops a spicy peanut into her mouth and sucks on it, looking thoughtful. She likes food that bites the tongue, likes the feeling of her body fighting against her own wants. The first time they kissed Haru had laughed at the look on Makoto’s face and kissed her again on her nose, on the soft skin below her eyelashes, and Makoto would have fought a thousand shadows to see that laugh play on repeat forever._

_“It’s like…” Haru taps a finger against her chin. “Well, I like you. It’s like that but times a thousand.”_

_“Oh,” Makoto says, her heart setting off on another marathon. She doesn’t really get it, but she likes Haru liking her._

_“But it’s funny,” Haru continues, her lips curved up in a sharp pink smile. “Ann must have said something to him.”_

_“Said something about what?” Makoto asks, because Eiko is right: she’d probably fail a test on love to this day, no matter how hard she’s studied or how many romance novels she reads._

_“About Akechi,” Haru says, blinking at Makoto with eyes the rich warm color of soil seeded with growing things. “About how Akira likes him."_

_Makoto is mid-sip when Haru says that: she chokes on her water and spits it out, coughing. Haru grabs a tissue and hands it over to her. When Makoto has cleared her windpipes enough to speak she says, “_ Akira? _Akira likes_ Akechi? _”_

_“He’s liked him for years,” Haru says, looking concerned for Makoto’s well-being but not at all upset that Akira likes the boy who--well, murdered Haru’s own father, to put it indelicately. “You hadn’t noticed?”_

u got 30 out of 100 _, Eiko texted her after the last beauty rag magazine test on romance skills._ that’s a failing grade!!!!

 _Makoto really hadn’t._ )

Makoto averts her eyes away from Akira and Akechi’s conversation and focuses on the minute-hand movements on her watch. Most of the others have arrived. Ann is early for once, thanks to Shiho. Makoto has twenty-two minutes before she has to send a rescue party after Yusuke.

If Haru isn’t bothered by it, then she’s okay.

* * *

The front side windows of the van are rolled down and the sunroof open to let in the summer breeze. The closer they get to the ocean the stronger the smells of salt-spray and brine become. It’s great, except it’s also annoying, because it keeps making strands of hair whip around Futaba’s face, and the glare of the stupid sun off of her Switch’s screen is making it hard to appreciate Retribution.

It’s almost 14:00. Makoto’s eyes keep tracking from the road, to the gps, to the clock, and back to the road. They got a late head start because _someone_ (Inari) was late doing something (almost getting swindled out of his life’s savings probably, if he even has any), and Makoto has a Thing about timetables. She probably still goes to bed at 23:00 at twenty-one. That’s cute.

Futaba locks her Switch and drops it into her bag, resigning herself to not being able to finish the paralogue on the drive there. She leans back in her seat and hums along with the music; Ann has been playing the latest Risette album on the van’s outdated stereo system on repeat for the last hour, and music is a thing of patterns. You can notate music with mathematical formulae--not that Futaba’s ever done it, not that she’s ever wanted to.

By the time they reach Haru’s beach house, it’s halfway to 15:00 and there’s the subtlest hint of a vein surging beneath the fine skin of Makoto’s temple. Futaba starts whistling one of the Risette songs as they pile out of the van, and Makoto gives her a Look like she knows what Futaba is doing.

Futaba’s not doing anything. That’s what vacations are for.

The beach house has three private bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen and a living space and a fancy jacuzzi out on the deck. Haru and Makoto get the master, Ann and Shiho get the second bedroom, and Futaba gets the third all to her own self. The guys are all stuck slumming it in the family room. It has absolutely nothing to do with gender and everything to do with property ownership, couple’s rights to privacy, and the fact that Futaba shut away by herself is less likely to keep anyone else up when she’s up until 2 in the morning playing video games.

The boys need to find people to get together, or become obnoxious night owls. If Yusuke stayed up to paint before the sun came up, he’d be voted a candidate for a private room. If Akira and Akechi--

No way, Futaba’s brain is not going down that path.

But oh god, it’s happening anyway. 

She’s saved by Makoto, the goddess of order and regimented schedules, knocking on the door and asking her to come to the kitchen for a meeting. She hears Makoto moving down the hall and repeating the instruction-slash-request to all of the others. 

Futaba tiptoes out into the kitchen and doesn’t return the quiet flash of Akira’s smile. She wasn’t even thinking anything indecent, because he’s basically her brother and that would be weird and gross. It’s just embarrassing! It’s embarrassing. She’s pretty sure the only person who hasn’t figured it out is Yusuke, who wouldn’t notice anything shoved in his face unless it had the proportions of the Mona Lisa or a lobster. That even Ryuji seems to have caught on is a goddamned godsend.

It was bad enough when Akira and Ann were dating and climbing the attic stairs was a possibly dangerous adventure because one or the other or both could be topless at any one moment, and Futaba never wanted to see that much of anyone’s skin.

Haru takes the lead away from Makoto by folding her hands over her sternum and smiling at each of them in turn, Akechi included, as if they’ve all given her a gift. “I’m so glad everyone’s staying here. Thank you so much for joining me.” 

A chorus of returned thank yous fills the air. Akechi’s voice is quieter and shyer than the others. Futaba glances at him from the corner of her eye and looks away. 

“We really appreciate it, Haru,” Makoto says, resting a hand on Haru’s shoulder in a gay way. “So thank you.”

Her phone buzzes. It’s Akechi.

> **Akechi:** I feel like the vice principal just opened up the room for the principal to dress us down  
>  **Futaba:** wow you catch on quick

Akechi catches her gaze and lifts his eyebrows. Futaba lifts her eyebrows back and looks hurriedly away. She’d started texting him because if she had to interact with him she’d rather do it her way, the safe way, no faces involved and only neat digital logographs mapped out on a digital screen. Why she’s kept talking to him since is beyond her. She blames it on the gremlin part of her brain where the ADHD sits in wait to eat up all her time.

It’s not often there are people who are smart on anywhere close to Futaba’s level.

“We’re a bit behind schedule,” Makoto continues, smiling around at each of them, the lines around her eyes tightening when she looks at Yusuke. Inari blinks at her, oblivious and unconcerned, which is good. Someone needs to sit Makoto down and explain that her pencil-point love of routine is not helpful to people whose routines do not fit her pattern.

“Fuck schedules,” Ryuji says, becoming Futaba’s ultimate hero. When everyone turns to look at him, he rubs his shoulder, embarrassed. “I mean--I mean, it’s a vacation, right? Schedules are for school and work.”

“That may be true,” Makoto begins, looking for all the world like she’s bracing herself for an argument.

Haru, the angel she is, steps in to place a hand on Makoto’s wrist. “Mako-chan,” Haru says, “maybe this time we can make it up as we go along?”

Nine sets of eyes look at Makoto with different levels of pleading. Makoto looks back at the rest of them and admits defeat. 

Maybe Futaba will complete Retribution tonight after all. She’s playing the game in Maddening mode.

* * *

The burdens of travel have their ways of making themselves known. Despite Niijima’s careful efforts at scheduling, by the late hour they arrive the only thing anyone has the energy to expend for is dinner.

They all have ample enough energy for that, at least.

“You’ve had Akira’s curry,” Futaba mutters to him, leaning in his direction while her body is frozen up like a tripwire. He’d thought they’d draw lots, like the guys did for the couch and floor spots in the family room, but he’d been wrong. “You’ve never had Haru’s cooking. If you’d had that, you’d understand.”

Goro has never had Haru Okumura’s cooking, that’s a certainty. He’s dubious that an heiress, no doubt accustomed to the help-prepared meals, could cook well enough to please a crowd.

Food isn’t a thing Goro has ever appreciated for its own value before. Food is a thing of sustenance. When your mother hasn’t the time to cook for you every night, when you subside on the meals provided by the group homes, one gets used to unpalatable meals. Goro has digested more microwaved meals than he has his own feelings.

Akira cooks the vegetables and Okumura grills the meat. Goro is thoroughly and sufficiently put in his place where his expectations are concerned.

The idea that food and drink is something that can be appreciated, something to be valued and qualified, was something that only came along with the credit card Shido had given him, and even then it had been a paltry imitation of actual pleasure, restrained by the desire of Goro’s superego for human attention. But when he remembers the curry Akira served him over a month ago, something hot and heavy settles in his belly. It had been delicious.

The meat and the vegetables are oiled and well-seasoned. Goro looks up as he chews on an onion, the sour flavor flooding his mouth, and sees Akira watching him with quiet eyes. 

Akira smiles. “How is it?” he asks.

Onions are mild and hot at the same time, the feeling of peppery sweetness dancing across his tongue. Goro crushes the allium layers between his teeth, tastes the way saltness draws out the sweetness, the warm, zesty bit of ginger. What’s left on his tongue is delicate, and savory, and warm.

Appreciating a meal for the taste of it in the face of its nutritional value is a new thing.

“Good,” Goro says, not meeting Akira’s eyes. “Whatever you did, it’s--good.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I forgot to say this last chapter (I have so many chapter notes I forgot to place properly; I should draft chapter notes), but I realized last chapter that Goro is 21, not 20. I've been loose with the timeline, but if we're in the summer after Goro's third year of high school, he's definitely 21. I'll go back and edit some of the later chapters at some point (I've already started editing the earlier ones).


	22. Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is brought to you by boys being thirsty and pining in equal measure.
> 
> And also Futaba, because she gives zero fucks and god bless her.
> 
> And also just to reiterate, I miscalculated Goro's age in this fic. He's twenty-one. I've referenced him in a past chapter as being twenty, but according to the timeline I've worked out, he's a full year beyond legal adulthood, and Akira's close to twenty himself.

Whenever they do things like this, Akira and Haru are always on cooking duty. That’s perfectly fine with Akira. He’s a giver: he likes being able to provide. His friends appreciate him for the simple things, and in that way Akira feels seen. He doesn’t mind being the first person awake if it means they get to wake up to a tableful of food made with care.

Staying at Haru’s vacation home means they get to work with ingredients of a quality Akira only ever dreams of being able to afford. She’ll draw up a grocery list and hand it off to a paid staffer to make sure the fridge is stocked and ready by the time they arrive. It must be nice being rich.

Haru pulls out one of the containers of miso soup she’d made earlier in the week and empties it out into a pot to warm on the stove, while Akira fries sausage in one pan and flips omelettes in another. The fourth burner is home for a third pan of quietly sizzling mackerel.

They’ve done enough of this sort of thing together that they have the kind of comfortable teamwork that feels like being back in the Metaverse and doing a baton pass, getting a crit and slapping gloved palm against gloved palm as they change places to take the enemy down. Morgana twines between their legs and nearly trips them, and Haru jokes that it’s perfect training for when she opens her first cafe and has to dance around the other cooks.

By the time the others start straggling into the kitchen the air is heavy with the rich, delicious smells of breakfast.

“Morning,” Akira says cheerfully as Ryuji drops heavily into a chair, rubbing at his messy, unstyled hair and yawning widely. Akira can be cheerful because he’s on his third cup of coffee, and counting.

“Mornin',” Ryuji mutters back, cutting himself off with another yawn. “Shit, that floor is hard to sleep on. You can tell I’m used to a bed.”

“Maybe you’ll pull the couch straw tonight?” Akira suggests helpfully. His back also hurts from the floor, but he's good at burying his complaints.

Ryuji rolls his eyes as Haru sets a bowl of steaming rice in front of him and hands him a fresh egg. “Dude, you know my luck’s not that good,” he says, cracking the egg over his rice and stirring it all together with his chopsticks.

Makoto joins them next, giving Haru a soft, private smile and Akira a sharper one. Next is Akechi, and Akira’s heart skips somersaults to do a full-on gymnastic routine. His usual neatly-styled hair is slightly unkempt from sleep and his eyes have the vague, unfocused look of the newly awake and hungry. He looks a thousand times vulnerable and soft in equal measure.

Akira smiles warmly, and after an awkward moment where Akechi seems to collect himself, and draw himself in and hesitate, he smiles back. Akira can see the barriers quietly reasserting themselves, the shutters being pulled half-closed, but that’s fine. Getting to see him in the easy moment before that was good enough.

 _Fuck_ , Akira’s got it bad, doesn’t he? Ann could have warned him.

“The fish is going to burn,” Haru says quietly. Akira jerks away from staring at Akechi to meet Haru’s eyes, and Haru is smiling gently at him, her eyes amused and knowing.

Wow. Even Haru knows. Akira has really been out here living his most oblivious life. He moves the fish from the hot pan to a plate and puts three more filets on the burner to cook.

By the time they finish cooking the rest of the food everyone else is there, each in a differing degree of not awake, from Ann’s ugly chipper to Futaba’s sleep-drunken grumbling. Akira and Haru take seats at opposite ends of the table and pass the food around. They all dig in and thank the chefs, and Haru again for her hospitality. There’s yogurt and fresh oranges and avocados on top of everything else.

Ann drains her glass and sets it back down. “Hey,” she says, “will you pass the juice, Goro-kun?”

Six pairs of eyes swivel to stare at Ann casually holding out her hand for the juice jug. Ryuji actually chokes on his rice and starts coughing: Akira slaps a palm against his back reflexively.

Ann scythes through their collective startled surprise with a leveled gaze and a roll of her eyes. “Why are you all being so weird?” she says in the voice she reserves for telling other people--usually Akira or Ryuji--that they’re making asses of themselves in public. “It’s normal to be on a first-name basis with a friend.”

She meets Akira’s eyes and smiles, the skin around her eyes crinkling up at the corners. Akira is an idiot times five, because he realizes he’s being given permission for something he hadn’t realized he was seeking.

He turns to look at Akechi--at Goro. Akechi--Goro--is staring at his scrambled eggs and pretending not to notice the strange knot of awkward tension hovering over the table. He looks like the deer Akira remembers from his hometown, the way they’d freeze with careless grace when startled, ready to flee at the slightest hint of danger. _I want to--_ Akira thinks, but he doesn’t finish the thought. He wants to what? What does he want? For him to not look like that is a start, but--

“So we can call you Goro?” Akira says, looking down at his fish. It’s shiny and browned, a contrast against the soft white of his plate. He’d cooked it in ponzu sauce, and it’s sweet and bitter and savory on his tongue.

Goro--Akechi--takes in a breath and lets it out all at once. It’s so quiet no one not paying attention would notice, but Akira is paying attention. He thinks the others are too, but not in the same way. Akira thinks that even rooms apart he could feel the air move when Goro breathes.

“I don’t mind,” Goro says.

Akira catches his eye then and smiles. “Sounds good,” he says, and then just to say it, just to feel the shape of the name on his tongue, “Goro.”

Goro’s bare fingers twitch on his chopsticks. He looks quickly away.

* * *

Three years ago Akira met a boy with hair the color of burnt caramel and rum-dark eyes. The boy was a celebrity and a nobody and a murderer all wrapped up into one. He put a gun to Akira’s doppelganger’s head and shot a bullet through its skull at point-blank range, and then tried to kill Akira a second time when he realized the first time hadn’t stuck.

Maybe it’s unhealthy because of all of that. Akira doesn’t think it is. Akira remembers being sixteen and seeing the boy smile and talk about the two of them in terms of destiny. He remembers serving him coffee and the way his fingers would curl around the cup, remembers conversations over games of chess and billiards, enthusiastic arguments about politics and ethics and philosophy and that weird sci-fi movie that came out that year about the aliens that spoke in circles.

Maybe you should throw the baby out with the bathwater. Akira doesn’t think so, or at least Akira doesn’t think that applies to everyone, and it definitely doesn’t apply to himself. He’s willing to tolerate a lot, and forgive a lot, if the person is deserving of it (deserving being the key word, because Akira is equally capable of resenting a lot, and hating a lot, and carrying a grudge to last a lifetime).

Which is all a really roundabout way of getting to the point of Akira in his current, uncomfortable reality, which is Goro Akechi in a swimsuit.

It’s not that Goro cuts an impressive figure, at least against Ryuji--Ryuji runs three days a week and lifts the other two, and Goro lost his routine in the strictures of juvie. But compared to Yusuke, who lives to be the starving artist archetype, or Akira, who mostly can’t be bothered unless forced, he’s--toned? Toned is a good word, and definitely not objectifying.

Akira grabs Ann's wrist as she walks past him. “Can you objectify guys?” he whisper-asks her.

Ann tilts her head to listen to his question then laughs. “Can you?” she bounces back. “I do on a daily basis.”

So Goro in a swimsuit is a Thing Akira is just going to have to deal with. It’s not even that it’s--it’s swim trunks. Akira is wearing swim trunks. Ryuji and Yusuke are wearing swim trunks. Akira’s seen Mishima in swim trunks; hell, Akira’s seen _Iwai_ in swim trunks. It’s just--

Different. There’s seeing, and then there’s _noticing_. If Ann covered his eyes right now and asked him what color Ryuji’s swim trunks were he’d have to guess. If she did the same but asked him about Goro, Akira would be able to answer. Light grey trunks and an open blue button down shirt, the sleeves rolled up past his elbows. He even has his hair pulled back with a tie again, and Akira doesn’t know why that specifically is a thing he should keep on noticing with an over-invested degree of interest, but it is. Does Akira have a neck fetish?

He’s definitely got _something_ , that’s for sure.

Ann leans forward at his side, her hands behind her back, and looks up at him with a sly smile. “I tried to get him to go for something a little bolder,” she says, her mouth a wicked curve. “Should I have pushed for a speedo?”

Akira pulls his glasses off to massage his fingers against his eyelids, trying to rub out the image that conjures.

Ann sounds like Carmen when she laughs; there’s something of Hecate in her smile.

“Are you having fun?” Akira hisses at her.

“ _So_ much,” she says.

He pulls his hand away from his eyes and blinks hard against the light until he can see again, then makes a grab for one of her ponytails. If he yanks a little too hard--oops.

“Hey!” Ann yells and kicks him hard in the knee, sending Akira crashing and eating sand.

* * *

Goro takes a seat on one of the pool chairs helpfully set out beneath an umbrella while the others charge into the water, whooping and hollering. To his surprise Morgana leaps up onto the end of the chair, curls up beside Goro’s feet, and goes to sleep. Goro stares at the cat in mute bewilderment before settling against the backrest and picking up his book. He’d reasoned that a weekend at a beach house was something like a vacation--not that he’s ever been on one to have a frame of reference--so he should read something less strictly cerebral, and Futaba had recommended _The Left Hand of Darkness_.

Goro hasn’t read much science fiction. He’s read his dystopias, certainly-- _Brave New World, The Handmaid’s Tale, Fahrenheit 451, 1984_ \--but the speculative fiction that speculates on the certainty of individual or collective advancement, the promise of progression in defiance of human deficiency, he’s dismissed with scornful fatalism.

This book may be less dense structurally than Kant or Voltaire, whose writings are in the styles of their times, but it is dense emotionally. The words breathe off of the page and sit in his mind, sinking slowly like stones in the water, spreading ripples like echoes. 

> _A friend. What is a friend, in a world where any friend may be a lover at a new phase of the moon? Not I, locked in my virility: no friend to Tharen Harth, or any other of this race. Neither man nor woman, neither and both, cyclic, lunar, metamorphosing under the hand’s touch, changelings in the human cradle, they were no flesh of mine, no friends; no love between us._

Morgana twitches his tail, brushing against his foot in a ghost-touch. Goro yanks his foot away, startled.

“They’re calling you,” the cat says, peering at him with one bright blue eye before closing it and falling back asleep.

“Yoooooo, dude!” Sakamoto shouts. Goro looks up to see him waving his arms in the air. “Hey, uhhh--Goro!”

Goro stares while Sakamato gestures his hand and spins a volleyball in the air. When he misses catching it, Ann body-checks him, laughing. Akira gives Goro a hopeful smile.

Goro holds up a hand and gestures to his book in answer rather than expending the energy to shout back. He settles back into his seat and picks up his book. Morgana is staring at him.

“Did you need something?” Goro asks sweetly.

“No,” Morgana says, “but you do.”

Goro ignores him and goes back to his book. Three pages later a shadow falls over him and Goro looks up to see Futaba standing with her fists on her hips, looking down at him with raised eyebrows and a scornful frown. “Yes?”

“Hey, nerd,” she says, which is quite an insult coming from her, of all people. “Get up. We’re playing beach volleyball.”

“I have my book, thank you,” he says, and does not add, _the book you told me I should read_. It’s not that he’s opposed to interacting with the others--he wouldn’t have come if he was--but he’s not sure how one does things on an outing like this, what the social rules are, what’s expected of him. When he was in high school he would have gone to any means necessary to keep the attention on him.

When he was in high school he was also ludicrously stupid and a murderer, among other things.

“That’s cool, we can hang out in total silence while you read and I play my Switch and Inari draws lobsters some other time,” says the girl whose mother he killed. “Now-time is for volleyball.”

“I’d really prefer to sit this one activity out.”

“Ohhhhh, I get it,” Futaba says, pushing her glasses up her nose and lifting her eyebrows in judgement. She grins, showing all her teeth. “You’re afraid of sucking at it and looking like an idiot.”

That makes his ire rise. “I am not--”

“It’s cool. I get it. You don’t want to embarrass yourself in front of people who already know you’re embarrassing--”

“Excuse me?”

“--because we’ve seen the dinky lightsaber and the ray gun and the striped bell-bottom onesie, and once you’ve seen all that you really can’t unsee it--”

Goro’s ears are burning in the sun. He’s under an umbrella. “That was--”

“--but if tripping in the sand and falling on your ass for everyone to laugh at you is what’s really a step too far, then--”

“Fine!” Goro says. “Fine, I’ll play beach volleyball, so can you _please_ stop?”

Futaba’s grin stretches from ear to ear as she leads him to join the others. When Goro walks up, Akira gives him a lopsided smile.

Suzui referees. The girls win, seven to four.

* * *

There’s a bricked-in fire pit on the back porch, and after dinner they stack it with chopped wood over kindling and set the lot on fire. They pass around Dr. Salt NEOs and Mantas and frozen chocolate-covered bananas and let the fun of the day ease into the softness of night.

Akira wonders what will happen, not next year but the year after, once Futaba’s turned twenty. What will it be like for them to sit together around a fire, all of them officially adults, drinking beer instead of caffeine? What will it be like ten years from now? Fifteen? Thirty? Will they still fit together in the same shape, their ends lining up against each others' neatly? 

In a month and a half, Akira turns twenty. He can feel adulthood creeping up on him like ivy, or like mold. He’s walking up to the edge of a cliff with no bottom in sight. Most of the others have already lept to their happy landings, but Akira doesn’t know what’s awaiting him at the bottom. The entire future feels like it’s fixed on that moment, like reaching the precipice of adulthood means walking through a door: on the other side is eternity and mortality and everything in-between. Twenty means next is graduating, next is boxing himself up into appropriate proportions and fitting into a society that wasn’t made for him.

The air fills with quiet chatter that eventually peters off into comfortable silence. Ann curls up in Shiho’s lap, and Makoto unwinds until she’s leaning against Haru, shoulder to shoulder, heads touching. Futaba has her headphones over her ears and her focus on her game, Ryuji scrolls through his phone, and Yusuke is drawing in his sketchpad. Goro sits to Akira’s right, reading quietly, and Akira watches the way the fire dances across the planes of his face and feels himself tumbling further into a very deep hole.

Volleyball had been fun, even if they lost (they always lose). Swimming in the ocean afterwards had been fun too, with the impromptu water fight that broke out between first Ann and Ryuji, and then grew to include everyone else. Goro had ducked behind Akira as Futaba chased him with a squirt gun, and when Futaba’s shot hit Akira’s waterproof non-prescription lenses and knocked his glasses clear off his face and into the ocean, Goro took one look at everyone’s immediate panic and devolved into a fit of helpless laughter that Akira can still hear, the echo sitting in his belly and doing all kinds of things to--well, all kinds of things.

The others drift inside in ones or in pairs, starting with a yawning Futaba and followed half an hour later by a giggling Shiho and Ann.

“You good, guys?” Ryuji asks before he heads inside. He’s the last one left, aside from Akira and Goro. Goro glances at him over the top of his book and mumbles a quiet _yes, thank you_ and _good night_. Ryuji’s eyes linger on Akira, sympathetic, considerate, and concerned.

Akira smiles, making sure it reaches his eyes. “I’m good. I’ll be in soon.”

And that’s a lie. Akira sits out there for another hour, and more, tending the dwindling fire and watching Goro from the corner of his eye in a way he hopes is subtle, trying hard not to stare. 

There’s a voice in his mind that sounds like Lavenza, like the twins talking both at once, that tells him he’s at a crossroads, or a precipice, or a confluence of factors, and/or fate, and/or both. There’s a voice that sounds like Igor, the real Igor, asking him what choice he’ll make.

Akira looks at Goro again and feels his heart flip over. Under moonlight, under firelight, Goro is beautiful. It’s not a word you use to describe men, but it’s the word that bubbles into Akira’s mind. Goro is beautiful. His eyes are so dark a red in the low light that they’re almost black; his face is framed by the soft fall of hair, and when he reads--Akira realizes this with a feeling of wheels clicking into place, like watching Chihaya read someone’s cards--when he reads his eyes furrow and he frowns, just slightly, just enough that Akira is left tracing the curve of his mouth and realizing that he--

That he wants. That Akira wants. And he can ask and ask a million questions, but none of Ann's or Lala's or Haru’s answers can help him with this.

Because Akira is looking at a boy who has killed his friend’s parents and has tried to kill him on more than one count and thinking, _I want to kiss him_. Akira is looking at this boy who knows how to hold a gun, a sword, a book--but not a hand. Other lonely things, but never that.

Akira is looking at a boy he knows is a wreck, categorically speaking. The boy is three steps away from a breakdown at any one given moment, because no one in his life ever taught him what it felt like to be loved. Akira knows that if he takes his own feelings, the messy mixed-up bits of measureless affection and amatory wants all rolled up into one, he can make pros and cons lists every day of the week and still find himself coming up wanting.

They’re the same. He knows they’re the same. He knows it the way he knows up and down, north and south, hot and cold, wrong and right. The same way he knows fast and slow, in and out, start and stop, never and forever. They’re the same.

They’re far enough from Tokyo that the night stars winkle out into the sky and share their light with the people watching them; that's the only thing about the country Akira has ever missed. Eventually Goro unfolds from his seat and pushes himself up to stand, his body sketching out neat lines in silhouette against the rising moon. He looks down at Akira and smiles. It’s not a smile that reaches his eyes: Goro doesn’t smile like that, but Akira wishes he would.

 _Which path will you take, guest?_ the voice of Lavenza echoes in his head.

Akira reaches out and brushes the tips of his fingers over the back of Goro’s hand, curls his fingers around Goro’s hand to touch the soft skin of his palm. Goro tenses like a rabbit but doesn’t yank away. He doesn’t know why, but he feels like he knows, or understands, or feels, on some level too deep to be put into words, Goro’s feelings aligning with his own.

“Sleep well,” Akira tells him.

Maybe they’ll see each other on the other side.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "In the future I might vary the chapter segments," I said, as I continue to write four-scene chapters. This chapter was actually going to be five scenes until I condensed it into four. I should basically just shut the fuck up.
> 
>  _The Left Hand of Darkness_ is one of Ursula K Le Guin's most famous and most awarded novels. It won both the Hugo and the Nebula. It also changed sci-fi/fantasy in ways we still can't measure, but we do deserve. It's a book that's not about science unless you're asking what biology means and why it matters. It's a book about gender, and about the absence of gender.
> 
>  _The Left Hand of Darkness_ is a part of Le Guin's _Hainish Cycle_ series (the only entry I've read is _The Telling_ , which is not one of the best books in the series according to reviews, but it meant a lot to me when I was coming out). The main characters are often representatives of the Ekumen, a politico-cultural collective representing all peoples who are offshoots of an ancient humanoid race. The people of the planet Gethen have no fixed sex and gender is irrelevant. It changed the landscape of science-fiction when it was published and remains a classic to this day because of how it paved the way for stories that deviated from heterosexual and cisgender norms.
> 
> I referenced it in Shrike for a few reasons: 1) it's extremely gay (male pronouns are used for Estraven throughout, because Le Guin was writing during the cultural revolution and the language wasn't fine-tuned for literary exploration, 2) Ai's journey in the book is explicitly about learning how to transcend the gender binary to understand people whose existence is beyond its rubric, and 3) Futaba is nonbinary and you can drag that headcanon out of my cold, dead fingers. Probably Goro is also nonbinary, and you're welcome to read him in Shrike that way, but I haven't gotten to the point of actually interrogating that question with him yet. Don't be surprised if three chapters from now I declare Goro to be nonbinary in fact.
> 
> Goro's attitude towards literature is not the same as his attitude towards TV/film, which is definitely more accepting of the optimistic, and I'll get into that eventually. The weird sci-fi movie Akira references is _Arrival_ , which is really, really good.
> 
> Thank you, as always, to Krist for talking me through my writerly moods and convincing my self that I make sense.


	23. Chapter 23

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry this chapter took me so long. I've been fixated on the P5R release and spoiling myself for the entire game. I'm staying on top of the P5R spoilers but I promise that they won't make their presence known in this unless it's in small things (Goro being a jazz nerd, for example). What I'm writing is fundamentally different from the story P5R is telling, and my Goro is not the same Goro that joins you in P5R. I'm okay with that.

_Goro comes to and knows where he is instantly._

_The Velvet Room. He hasn’t been here in ages, not since after Robin Hood awakened, all those months ago. He’d shaken the hand of a boy in a TV station and walked away with the twins’ voices ringing in his ears, and when he woke up Igor’s words had hung in the air in echoes._

_It’s different this time, thought he can’t pin why. He’s in his own clothes in place of the roughspun wool of his dreams, and the glaringly harsh lights normally directed into his cell are missing. The twins themselves are nowhere to be found, and where an old oak barrister’s desk should be in the center of the room his cell faces out on, instead there’s a corridor stretching to the left and right in either direction._

_Goro notes all of these details with the apathy of the incarcerated._

_From the beginning he was a pawn in a false god’s plan. What reason should he have to be surprised? He was stupid enough to believe he could use his father without being used in turn, despite knowing from childhood that he mattered not a sliver of a fraction of an ounce in the grand scheme of the world. He gets a little bit of power and he thinks he’s special, and that’s a joke in the end. He was always a game piece on someone else’s checkerboard, a puppet dancing on their strings._

_Fuck humanity. They want to burn so badly, then they can burn in hell._

_A shadow falls over him. Goro looks up to see black on blue, coattails flapping in a wind that isn’t there. The steel grey of Joker’s eyes is stencilled out by the lavish white of his mask, bright against the gloom._

_“Come with me,” Joker says, touching a hand to the barred door. The door swings open on creaking hinges._

_“Come with you?” Goro croaks, his voice creaking with laughter. “Why? Humanity wants this. Fuck them, as far as I’m concerned. Why should I lift a hand for anyone else when they’ve never lifted so much as a pinky for me?”_

_Joker’s eyes are hard steel and soft flint all at once. “You don’t believe that,” he says and keeps on speaking, holding up a hand before Goro can interrupt. “No, let me finish.”_

_Joker pulls his mask off. He looms over Goro, mythic in manifestation. “You don’t believe that,” Akira says, “and I know you don’t believe it because I don’t believe it. Because we’re the same. At the end of the day, you want people to be decent. Why did you get into this in the first place?”_

Why? _Goro watched his mother slave away through her life until she had nothing left to give. He was passed around from group home to foster home to group home and back, with the word_ illegitimate _dragging itself through every ripple in his wake. He was a_ child _. Children are supposed to be valued, until caring for them becomes inconvenient and the system has a stomach where a heart should be. The entire system is broken and he still wishes, even now, even after being torn down to his rafters, that he could smash it all to pieces._

_“It’s not fair.” The words leave his throat in an ugly snarl. “The whole fucking world, it’s--”_

_A red-gloved hand appears before him and Goro looks up, dizzy with the whiplash of cascading through rage into a desire for something more._

_“It’s not fair,” Akira agrees, hand extended and smiling that world-altering smile. A smile that hooks itself into Goro’s bones and sits in him, sinking deep. “Let’s go fix it.”_

_Goro stares. After a moment he reaches out and lets himself be pulled up into the light._

* * *

The trip back to the city is marked by the kind of inane banter he remembers: bad puns and arguments on mundane topics that quickly devolve into absurdity. Goro sits in a window seat and reads and tries to ignore it when Akira’s knee occasionally brushes against his. Akira is bright smiles and easy laughter, and Goro--

Goro feels on edge for reasons he can’t qualify. When they reach Shibuya and everyone minus Niijima clambers out of the van, Goro says his quiet goodbyes and his thank yous and turns to go, only to be stopped by a hand on his shoulder that feels heavier than it is. He turns back around to face Akira, who’s watching him through his glasses with calculated earnestness.

“I’m fine,” Goro says before Akira can ask. “It’s only fatigue settling in from all the excitement, that’s all.”

“Okay,” Akira says. “I figured you were more of an introvert under it all.”

He smiles as he says it, the slightest curve at the corners of his mouth, soft and intimate. He’s always seen too much, too easily. Goro hates the way it makes something in his belly twist with discomfort, and with other things too. It’s not fair that Akira should see through him so easily when Akira is layers and layers of mineral and mantle hiding a molten core. It makes Goro’s teeth ache. It makes him want to scream.

“Thank you for inviting me,” Goro says, returning his smile. “I had fun.”

“I’m glad you came,” Akira says. “Talk to you later?”

“Later,” Goro agrees and walks away.

When he gets home he sets to unpacking, sorting out his dirty laundry and putting away his toothbrush, his deodorant, the spare charger for his phone. He’s practiced at doing what needs to be done without needing to think about it. He’s spent so much of his life pretending like he has it all together when he’s five steps away from it all falling to pieces.

Once everything is put away, Goro sits on his bed and looks around at the new, modern furniture in his bedroom. There’s a desk in the corner now, a dresser against one wall and two bookshelves against the other that he’s slowly filling. In the living room he has a couch with a coffee table, heavy curtains framing the patio window. His apartment is beginning to resemble a lived-in space, somewhere Goro can look forward to returning to at day’s end.

He’s returned now, but he doesn’t know why it doesn’t feel quite right.

He’s glad that he went. He is. He had fun. He still doesn’t understand their strange unselfish kindness, how easily they pull him into their circle, their insistence that he belongs.

It’s crawling towards evening and he still needs to eat dinner. Between the microwavable meals in his freezer and the prospect of ordering take-out, he’d rather the latter than the former.

He checks his calendar. Weariness drags down on him, sinking its hooks into his bones. Akira wasn’t wrong: he is an introvert. Any and every social endeavor requires time alone to draw in on himself and recharge.

He curls up on his bed and falls asleep. When he wakes up it’s late enough that when he orders food, he has to pay for delivery.

* * *

Sojiro stubs out a hasty cigarette the minute he sees they’re through the door. Akira and Futaba both look at him with mirrored expressions: eyebrows lifted, frowning minutely. He’d tell them to respect their elders but he knows the crowd he’s talking to better than to try that. They’ve been trying to get him to quit smoking for the last year and a half. He can deal with Akira’s sly sarcasm, but the worst is when Futaba gives him the pleading puppy eyes.

As far as he’s concerned, life hasn’t killed him yet.

“Oh, hey, you’re back,” he says, averting the conversation before it can even start to fix them up with food and drinks. “How was your trip?”

The kids claim the booth at the back for themselves and the cat leaps out of Akira’s bag to go inspect his food bowl. What is it with cats, even selectively talking ones, always acting like the food’s disappeared the minute it’s out of sight?

“It was nice,” Akira says. “We did beach stuff.”

“We beat their asses at volleyball!” Futaba crows.

“Language, Futaba!” Sojiro chides. Futaba blows a raspberry in no one’s general direction.

Sojiro brings them their food and their coffee. You can tell a lot about someone by how they take their coffee: Futaba likes hers sweet but with enough caffeine to raise the dead, and Akira likes the complex flavor of rich dark roasts with a hint of cream to mellow out the body. He knows a lot of people’s orders by heart but he could make these two in his sleep, blindfolded and with both hands tied behind his back. Sojiro lets them eat and listens to their quiet chatter.

He knows how he became a father. He knows the specifics of it twice over. What he doesn’t know is how the wheels of fate managed to line up with such uncanny grace to give him two kids he never planned on having, who became such irreplaceable fixtures in Sojiro’s life that his memories of his life before they came into it have holes in it where his kids should be.

He pulls out one of the bar stools and perches on it to watch them as they eat. What the hell is he going to do with himself when Futaba moves out? She sleeps in too long and stays up too late and can’t make rice without burning it, but she fills up the empty air in his old bachelor pad with her endless energy. He can’t understand half the words that come out of her mouth but just the fact that she doesn’t feel like she has to talk herself down to his level is a gift. He’s been reading up on empty nest syndrome so he’s ready to cope when he has to.

Akira is something else entirely. They’ve come a long way since the first day Akira walked through Leblanc’s door, his careful quietly hostile civility barely masking a wellspring of anarchy fathoms deep, and Sojiro not yet ready to hold out the olive branch he should have from the start. His fault--and somehow he’d found himself put in place by a sixteen-year-old with a stronger moral compass and more empathy than most people can stomach in lifetimes.

( _“Business, huh,” Sojiro said, watching Akira from across the bar while Akira eats lunch. He’s been back in the city for all of three days and Sojiro’s only now asking. “What made you settle on that?”_

_He’s not blind and he’s not stupid. He can see Akira shaking the countryside off of him, the way he reacclimatizes himself to the city like a man walking in out of the cold. Akira looks up at him at the not-question, something cautious in his eyes. Reading Akira is tough but Sojiro has a year-long dictionary that he wrote himself. He’s spent the past year hiding his real face and justifying himself to people who don’t care who he really is or what he wants, his own parents included._

_“I didn’t think bartending would sound as impressive,” Akira settles on, giving Sojiro a wry smile, “or win me my train ticket back here.”_

_Akira looks wistfully at the French press. He always looks his happiest in an apron, making someone else’s drink._

_Sojiro gets the feeling because Sojiro’s been there too._

_He has ideas of his own._ )

“Friday,” Akira says, yanking Sojiro out of his reverie. “I can get the flowers, if you want. Rika always gives me a discount.”

“You have to get the right ones,” Futaba insists. “You can’t do poppies or roses. Chrysanthemums are--

“I know my flowers.”

“I know that, obviously! But like--”

“Futaba, I promise, I know my flowers.”

“If it’s not too much trouble,” Sojiro cuts in, giving Futaba a look. Futaba wants everything to be perfect. Sojiro gets that--and so does Akira. And hell if either Sojiro or Futaba knows the first thing about floristry. At least Akira worked for one part time. 

“It’s not,” Akira says, agreeing as easily as he agrees to anything. He picks up his coffee and takes a long sip of it, letting it stay in his mouth and sit on his tongue, appreciating the sharpness. He almost looks content when he smiles.

* * *

The news had warned against the chance of storms, but Futaba knows meteorology is an inexact science with a likelihood of accuracy roughly on par with getting all the best characters in a gatcha (theoretically possible, but unlikely). Friday dawns bright and warm with blue, blue skies, not a cloud in sight.

Excellent.

Sojiro is already up, she knows. He’s the only one allowed to make the curry today.

Futaba hurries through the steps of getting ready: yanking the only dress she owns off a hanger in her closet and shimmying into it, pulling her hair part-way back with a limited edition Chiitan hairclip, washing her face and brushing her teeth. Downstairs she digs around for her good black boots, the calf-high ones with the buckles, and once she pulls them on she’s out the door.

“Look who’s up early,” Sojiro says when she reaches Leblanc. He turns off the TV and sets out a plate of curry on the bar for her while she climbs up onto a stool. “Did you sleep okay?”

Food first, answers after. Futaba hums around a mouthful of tasty, tasty curry. It’s the best batch Sojiro’s ever made.

“Slept great,” she answers once she’s washed the curry down. “Where’s Akira and Mona-Mona?”

“Picking up the flowers. We’ll meet them there once you’re done.”

It’s not a hint to eat quickly, but it’s near enough to it. Futaba finishes her food in as much of a middle ground between appreciating and inhaling as she can manage. It’s too delicious; she can’t help it. Sojiro always pulls out all the stops today.

They leave the cafe and Sojiro locks up, the sign outside apologizing for the inconvenience while they attend to a family matter. Sojiro always puts it out even though it’s not really necessary, because the regulars all know that Leblanc is always closed on August 21st.

They take the train to the district where the cemetery is and make their way down streets and side-streets until they find the little temple that’s harbor for the Isshiki family grave. Akira is at the gate waiting for them, his bag over his shoulder as ever, and Mona’s head thrust through an opening in the zippered closure. He smiles when he sees them, smiles a smile when he meets her eyes that’s for Futaba alone and rubs a hand at the back of his neck. His free hand is filled with flowers.

Futaba doesn’t have the skill level required to define what _home_ is. But if she had to try she’d say it’s finding a family when family’s all gone. 

Family isn’t a thing you can quantify or qualify. You can’t measure it out into tidy little bits and pieces. Family is a feeling. Family is safety. Family is the promise of not being alone. Family is Akira’s easy smiles and Sojiro’s awkward praise. Family is safety and knowing that when you go home no outside ugliness can touch you there.

When they reach the grave, they set to work cleaning up. When they’re done the marble’s shining. Akira passes the flowers to Futaba, and Futaba puts them in their places with the same careful consideration she puts into writing untouchably perfect code. It’s an act of revolutionary self-love to make herself a part of the eternal digital forever.

She claps her hands together and bows before the grave. She feels like a bird, something graceful and transitory, ready to take wing.

There are so many things she wants to tell Mom. Things that can’t be put into words. _Hi mom_ , she thinks, _I miss you more than words can say_.

_Hi Mom, I’m halfway through my first year of college. I’m learning so many things. I wish I could tell you all about them because I think you’d actually understand._

_Mom, I know the boy who killed you. He’s almost three years older than me and he’s a wreck. Would you care, Mom? Would you care? I care. I want to believe that you’d care because I care and I hate him and I feel so bad for him and he’s the second person in my message history and I want to--_

Futaba sets the flowers in their place and breathes. Akira takes her hand.

 _I want the future to have room for terrible things_ , Futaba thinks, clinging tight to Akira. _I want the future to be good. I want my heart to be so big I love the people who’ve hurt me. Can I do that, Mom? Can I do that for you? Can I be that strong?_

Goro Akechi is the third down on her contacts. They argued about Featherman. Futaba told him he was stupid, because he is. He’s an idiot and Akira’s a dumbass and Futaba wants the world to tell her that compassion is hard, but also okay.

Compassion is hard, but it’s never wrong. It’s always right.

Sojiro takes her other hand. Futaba pictures herself standing before the grave, hand in hand with her father and her brother, safe between them both. 

Futaba wants a world without borders. Futaba wants a world where people who have been hurt can see their hurts so clearly that they understand them. Futaba wants a world where everyone can see the people who have hurt them, really see them, see them so clearly that they’re recognized for the people they are.

She tightens her left hand around Sojiro’s right. She tightens her right hand around Akira’s left.

“Hey mom,” Futaba says out loud over city sounds and birds singing. “I’ve missed you, and I hope you’re okay.”

* * *

You remember your firsts. First touch, first kiss, first loss, first love. First means the primordial truth of a feeling.

Goro remembers his first murder. He remembers every tiny detail--the weight of the gun in his grip, the way she’d begged and pleaded. Goro remembers looking down on a woman, a mother who was a mirror of his own, and turning Loki on his own self because that was the only way he could be empty enough to do what needed to be done.

Goro killed Wakaba Isshiki. Goro looked her in the eye, and then looked at her shadow in the eye too. There’s a girl near his age, a girl who speaks in circles, a girl who wanted once to die: Goro sees her the way he sees himself, an empty mess of a person, a cross-stitched human being, and Goro thinks, _I did this_.

He’s not wrong, because he did. He did do this. He orphaned Futaba Sakura. He orphaned Haru Okumura. He took the smaller details of his own specific hell and forced them onto two people he didn’t know, because they meant nothing to him at the time. There are two girls at the precipice of adulthood, two girls standing tip-toed at the threshold of being women, whose parents Goro murdered. They’ll live with that for the rest of their lives and Goro will live with it too.

It will never be okay.

The first person Goro turned Loki's sword on was himself. He did it for a reason, and that reason was small enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're so very close to things happening. Obviously I'm allergic to using a timeline but I threw it out in this fic: we're at 8/21/20, and the anniversary of Wakaba's death.
> 
> It only took me twenty-three chapters to find a space for Sojiro's POV.
> 
> I'm going into kind of like...a lot of personal HC of what Goro's personality is really like. I think he's an introvert and much quieter and more reserved than he behaves in canon. I think that he acts so gregariously is because he wants attention. I see a lot of my own neurodivergent social behaviors in him.
> 
> I went to some very personal places with Futaba this chapter. I'm very open on my tumblr about how I lost my father to gun violence when I was young and all the hard emotional work to reach my current understanding of interpersonal violence. I love comments, but please don't comment to say you're sorry or you think I'm brave. I'm not brave. Getting to where I am was a struggle. But I love Futaba and I love Haru and I'll say it over and over until I'm blue in the face: you can't tell a story about Goro being redeemed or Goro healing unless you're prepared to give them a stage to stand on and speak their own feelings.


	24. Chapter 24

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Small reference to masturbation in this chapter, but it's nothing even leaning close to explicit so I don't think the rating needs to change. If you'd rather avoid that, it's in Akira's first (present day) POV scene.

_The boy from the TV station is a contradiction on two legs. Akira watches him from across the billiard table, watches the way he leans over the table, holding his body in perfect alignment to strike a ball. He holds the tip of his pool stick to his mouth and blows the dusting of chalk away with a pleased and patronizing smile._

_“Billiards is all about trigonometry,” Akechi says, his smile a little wicked and a lot smug. “You strike the ball at an angle so it hits the next ball with exactly the right force in precision to the direction you want your target to move in. Are you any good at that?”_

_Akira’s good at school but he’s bad at math, no matter what his test scores say. He can’t work out geometry, the lines and angles, in an abstract sense, but he can fake his way through just about anything. “I’m good at making the odds work in my favor,” he says instead. It’s not untrue, because he is. Fate can deal him a crap hand and Akira can make it screw off most times._

_He picks his target and knocks the white ball towards it. He’s successful in that he’s able to knock the seven into the far hole, but he doesn’t get very far past that. Akechi watches him with subtle amusement and sly superiority, and it’s stupid but Akira likes that. The way Akechi looks at him doesn’t feel the same way it feels when he’s walking through the hallways at school and the other kids are whispering, whispering._

_Akechi doesn’t see Akira as someone beneath him because of his record. Akechi sees Akira as an equal, and he sees himself as better because of that. It makes something twist in Akira’s belly in a way that he can’t understand._

_What he knows is that he likes it when Akechi is watching him._

_And he wants him to keep looking._

  


* * *

  


> **Ann:** hey goro-kun! where do you live?  
>  **Goro:** I’d really rather not say.  
>  **Ann:** :(  
>  **Goro:** Primarily because I suspect you’re the type of person to invite yourself over and then never leave.  
>  **Ryuji:** you WOULD  
>  **Ann:** ok u know what that’s fair  
>  **Ann:** i hoped maybe you have an illicit and fully stocked liquor cabinet  
>  **Makoto:** It wouldn’t be illicit. He’s legally old enough to drink alcohol.  
>  **Makoto:** You, however, are not.  
>  **Ryuji:** she got you there  
>  **Goro:** Even if I did--which I do not--I wouldn’t let you drink any.  
>  **Goro:** I’d rather not be arrested a second time, thank you.  
>  **Makoto:** Sensible.  
>  **Haru:** Your birthday’s coming up soon, Ann! And Akira’s too. We can all go out then.  
>  **Akira:** I want to go to Crossroads  
>  **Yusuke:** Don't you work there?  
>  **Akira:** and I want to learn how to make a hot white russian  
>  **Ann:** oh my god  
>  **Akira:** and then I want to watch Morgana drink it  
>  **Makoto:** _Please_ do not give your cat alcohol.  
>  **Haru:** Wouldn’t catnip be best....?  
>  **Akira:** tried it. doesn’t work on him  
>  **Akira:** I mean after all  
>  **Futaba:** NOT A CAT  
>  **Ann:** he's not a cat  
>  **Ryuji:** he's not a cat  
>  **Haru:** He's not a cat!  
>  **Yusuke:** He is indeed not what I would think of as a cat.  
>  **Akira:** :)

  


* * *

  


“How was the trip, dear?” Ms Kitamura asks. She’s not reading another rag sheet on spirit remedies, thank god. The magazine she’s thumbing through is the kind any other old person would read: a periodical of popular medicine, promising the future of gene therapy in place of crystal healing.

It’s cloyingly hot in the store, but the fan provides enough respite for it to be tolerable. Goro can’t wait until summer is dead: give him the biting cold of February over the sweltering heat of August any day of the year. He can’t wait for long sleeves, sweaters, and the familiar comforting confines of his gloves. People are easy in the summer; people are open.

Goro is the white king on his own chess board: he feels safer with other pieces between him and the opposing player.

“Fine,” he says. “Thank you for asking.”

He’s not sure how to explain how the trip felt to her. He’s not sure how to explain it to himself. He feels like he passed some horizon, but now there’s a precipice at his feet and danger, danger lying in wait at the bottom. 

He wants, inexplicably, to tell her everything. About his father. About the bodies, and everything in between. About two girls whose hearts are bigger than his. About ~~a boy, a boy, a boy~~ \--being seen for the first time.

She makes a little humming sound. She is old and wise beyond her years, and Goro knows she sees through him enough to terrify him, but in the strangest way it doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s because of her age, how being so close to death makes her look at the world without judgement. Death has its own disregard for transgressors. Death isn’t what matters: life is.

He doesn’t know what he would do without her unfaltering kindness. He’s starting to think he might be kind of okay, in a very smashed-up sense, but kind of is better than nothing, and he thinks she’s one piece of that very strange puzzle. He knows there are other pieces--Sae is one, and someone else is another.

“What would you like for dinner?” she asks him, because she’s made him a part of her life so easily, as if she thinks he belongs there. “I think we might close up early enough to stop at the market on the way home.”

Goro lets out a breath he doesn’t realize he’s holding. “I’ll enjoy anything you make.”

  


* * *

  


Akira wakes from a dream that’s--a lot, to say the least. Too many hands and too much skin, and he wakes up flushed and hard and there’s a cat in his bed, so what can he do.

That’s a--that’s a problem. Akira lives with a sentient cat who sulked over his last partner. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do this time around. At least Morgana doesn't have a crush on this one.

He shoves the confusion to the side and stumbles down the stairs to the bathroom to do what needs to be done. If the summer sun gives Akira a better picture of what reality might be, well--that’s Akira’s fault for not anticipating that, isn’t it? If Akira can’t forget what Goro’s hand felt like in his, palm to palm, that’s Akira’s problem. He can’t stop thinking about bare skin against bare skin. It’s like being a teenager all over again.

Morgana is awake and cleaning himself by the time Akira stumbles himself back upstairs. He looks at Akira with eyes that are judging, because cats can hear whatever and Akira was just (un)lucky enough to draw the lot for the sentient one. He’d give Morgana anything. He’d also give anything for Morgana to not be present to hear Akira getting himself off in Leblanc’s bathroom at 4:30 AM.

What he’d really give anything for is for Goro to feel like they’re inevitable as much as Akira does. 

Akira looks at Morgana’s judgy face and feels heat creeping up the back of his neck. “So, uh—” he starts, and coughs, rubbing at his shoulder. “Are you coming with today or….?”

“I think I’ll stay right here,” Morgana says, turning in a circle and settling back down to clean himself. “When I wake up I can eat Haru’s curry, and at least _she_ won’t be gross or weird.”

Akira has seen _The Three Mothers_ with Haru and knows Morgana doesn’t really have the whole picture, but he’ll let him keep his innocence as far as that’s concerned.

They worked out a birth date for Morgana a while ago, so he can fit in with the rest of them--April 11th, counted back just a few months over five years from today. Cats can live up to sixteen years, but Akira hopes whatever rules apply to mortals apply even less to demigods, or whatever Morgana exactly is. Akira is so much of a cat person he can’t see himself without a cat, much less without _his_ cat--however much he sometimes judges him.

Morgana pushes himself up on his kitty paws into a stretch, arching his back the way only cats can, which Akira’s always been a little jealous of because it looks supremely satisfying. He tilts his kitty head and looks at Akira across the room.

“Well?” he says, his whiskers twitching. “Are you going to get going or not?”

  


* * *

  


> **Goro:** My apartment is in Koenji.  
>  **Goro:** For the record  
>  **Ann:** !!!!!!!!  
>  **Goro:** No.  
>  **Ann:** :( :( :(  
>  **Goro:** I will give you my address if and only if I am in the midst of a dire emergency.  
>  **Akira:** hey, that’s close to where I work  
>  **Goro:** Yes, I’d realized.  
>  **Ann:** :((((((((((((((((((((((((  
>  **Goro:** Please stop.  
>  **Ann:** :(((((((((((  
>  **Goro:** Stop it.  
>  **Ann:** FIIIIIIIINE  
>  **Ann:** but you better be at my bday party  
>  **Goro:** I’ll add it to my calendar.

  


* * *

  


As August crawls towards its end and the promise of September, the late summer heat sits over the city like a very warm and humid blanket. The worst is standing under the hot sun, bracing himself against his knees and trying to catch his breath while it tries its level best to escape him. He feels sticky with sweat, and not in a fun way. How his legs haven’t given out on him yet is a miracle.

Ryuji slaps a palm against the flat of Akira’s back and hands him a water bottle. Akira twists off the cap and pours half of it over his head before downing the rest, the icy fingers of brain freeze dragging against the inside of his skull. Training makes Akira die inside, but it always puts Ryuji in a good mood.

He can still strong-arm Akira into exercising, because _no_ is still not a word in Akira’s dictionary and probably never will be, at least not where making the people he cares about happy is concerned.

“We did pretty good today,” Ryuji says, wiping his face with a towel and slinging it around the back of his neck. “You hungry?”

Of course his hungry. “Monja?” Akira asks. Ryuji grins.

They clean up in the locker room and take the subway to Tsukushima, where they claim one of the little tables. A waiter brings them bowls of batter and other ingredients, and they cook their meals on the tabletop grill with spatula until the monja is good and crispy. Ryuji chatters about school, his mom, his part-time job at the beef bowl shop. He’s two years into a physical education program; his mom’s healthy and working less, now that Ryuji’s working part time to help her; there’s a girl at work he likes, who’s polite when customers are around and not polite when they aren’t, but she has a code of honor a mile long and laughs louder than is acceptable. Ryuji’s pretty sure she was in a girl gang in middle school.

“Can I ask you something?” Ryuji asks, which is more tact than Ryuji normally manages. Akira loves him, but subtlety and Ryuji are not acquainted.

“You’re already asking me something,” Akira points out.

“Oh.” Ryuji rubs the back of his neck and laughs awkwardly. “Yeah, you’re right. It’s just--uhhh, I don’t really know how to say this--this thing about Akechi—uh, Goro—” He corrects himself at Akira’s raised eyebrows. “Yeah, okay. He just seems kinda...high-maintenance?”

Which is probably the gentlest way Ryuji has ever accidentally insulted someone’s character in his entire life. Akira laughs.

Ryuji sighs in relief. “Oh, thank god. I thought you were gonna be pissed with me for asking.”

“Asking what?” Akira laughs, taking a quick sip of his water to swallow any impending hiccups. “If I’ve lost my mind?”

“I mean--I mean, maybe? You dated _Ann_. I still think you’re crazy for that.”

Akira asked Ann once, not long after they started dating, why she’d never hooked up with Ryuji. The tension was there, because you couldn’t be a healthy teenage boy--or attracted to women, at any rate--and not have your insides feel a little funny when Ann smiled at you, and Ann was open and easily physical around Ryuji in a way that made you want to read into it. Ann had laughed at the question. “Are you kidding me?" she'd said. "We’d kill each other within five minutes.”

So, okay. It’s fair Ryuji would think that. They all know _something_ happened in the interrogation room, when Futaba triggered the Metaverse app and pulled Goro in. They were all there when Goro tried to kill Akira the second time, and the rest of them too for good measure.

They were also there when Goro was inches away from giving his life for them. They were there for the rest of it, too--Shido and Mementos and everything that came after. 

Akira remembers walking through the world during the months-long trial, listening to the gossips at school and the gossips in the city tear Goro Akechi to pieces, the frantic effort the news went to in order to drag open his closely guarded past and air it out in the open where everyone could see, without having the tiniest measure of sympathy--and feeling rage twisting like a hot viper in his belly. Those people didn’t see Goro on the deck of his father’s palace, hunched in on himself and looking fractured and too small. They didn’t see him point the level barrel of a gun at his father’s Shadow, finger inching towards the trigger--and jerking around to walk away.

Akira saw it. Ryuji and the rest of his friends saw it too.

Has Akira gone off the deep end? A case could be made. You wind up with a few screws loose when you see the things he’s seen. Maybe you can measure hurts and virtues on a scale, but should you? It depends on the person. When he looks at Goro all he can think of is how easy it is to be taken for granted. All he can think is how he’s never felt so much like he’s looking into a mirror.

“Maybe I am crazy,” Akira says, easing the spatula under a pool of sizzling monja batter and flipping it over to cook the other side. “But if I am, we all are.”

When he looks up Ryuji’s mouth is curled up at the corner in a wry half-grin. “Fair enough. I know you ain’t stupid, man.”

“Neither are you,” Akira says, which wins him a sunny grin. “And I appreciate you worrying for me.”

“Hey,” Ryuji says. “What else’re friends for?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know at what point I'm going to go into this in the context of the story, so have each character and their college major in specifics:
> 
> Akira - Business  
> Morgana - cat  
> Ryuji - Physical education  
> Ann - Not going to college, modelling professionally and doing internships  
> Yusuke - Fine arts  
> Makoto - Criminal justice  
> Futaba - Systems building & analysis  
> Haru - Hospitality management & business double major  
> Goro - to be revealed
> 
>  _The Three Mothers_ is a film trilogy by Dario Argento, who's a horror auteur and known for some extremely disturbing horror. I can't watch the vast majority of horror (my two exceptions are _The VVitch_ and _The Haunting of Hill House_ ), so I ran by Krist to find a horror movie (or movies) that would be disturbing enough to put off chad viewers but complex enough that Haru would be very into it.
> 
> I am admittedly not a Ryuji stan but I think that's a big blind spot in this fic bc he's important and he DOES deserve good things, and I do think he'd be very BRO BRO BRO about his bro being into somebody. I hope I do justice by him! I kind of modeled the girl he's into after Arisa Uotani from Fruits Basket.


	25. Chapter 25

_Goro Akechi orders a different drink every time he visits, but there are commonalities between each brew. He prefers blonde roasts over dark, heavy cream over milk, and he likes his drinks on the sweeter side. He’s taken to looking up drinks online and coming in armed with a request for something obscure Akira doesn’t know how to make as a challenge, so Akira has to look up the instructions and try to become an instant expert in five minutes and under. Today it’s an espressino._

_Sojiro says you can tell a lot about a person by how they take their coffee. Akira is trying to learn how to read between the lines._

_“Mmm,” Akechi hums, lips pursed at the rim of his coffee cup. “Delicious, as usual. I’ve never had Nutella before. It compliments the blend quite nicely.”_

_“Is that going on your food blog?”_

_Akechi lifts a manicured eyebrow. “You’re_ teasing _me.”_

_“Maybe a little,” Akira agrees. It wins him a sharp smile._

_It’s raining outside, the rain coming down in icy autumn sheets. They should be in Mementos today, practicing for the next big push into Sae’s casino, but._

_Akira looks at the boy across from him and wonders if he keeps his gun in the hollowed-out bottom of his briefcase._

_Everyone needs a day off from time to time._

_Akechi taps the end of a pen against the hardwood bar, drawing Akira out of the line of his thoughts with a disarming smile. Akechi’s full of smiles, mostly empty ones, but this one is warm and reaches his eyes for once._

_“Have you given any thought to your next move?”_

_“Which one?” They’re playing seven different games at least, and only some of them are lethal._

_“There are at least seven different moves you could make,” he says. “If I were you, I would--oh, my apologies. I was referring to our chess match.”_

_“Oh, that one.” Akira moves down the bar to where the board is set up at Akechi’s left hand. He’s on heavy defense but he’s not going to give the ghost up quite yet._

_Akira studies the board, and after a moment of careful contemplation, advances his king._

_He looks up to see Akechi watching him with raised eyebrows and thinly concealed delight. “A bold move, putting yourself out in the open like that.”_

_Akira grins one of Joker’s grins, cheeky and flashing teeth. “I like to live dangerously.”_

_“So I see,” says Akechi as he moves his knight to C5 and takes Akira’s queen. “Unfortunately for you, you’ll have to play better than that if you hope to steal my king.”_

* * *

> **Akira:** are you free Saturday?  
>  **Goro:** I am.  
>  **Akira:** if you’re not doing anything  
>  **Akira:** might be boring idk  
>  **Akira:** i rented a cheesy movie  
>  **Goro:** That may depend on your definition of cheesy  
>  **Akira:** heroes win  
>  **Akira:** theme song  
>  **Akira:** costumes probably?  
>  **Goro:** Are you stereotyping me?  
>  **Akira:** ………………….maybe?  
>  **Akira:** in a good way though  
>  **Goro:** I hesitate to say yes  
>  **Goro:** and yet  
>  **Akira:** so it’s a date?  
>  **Goro:** I’ll drop by for coffee at the very least

* * *

September means sweet potatoes, means matsutake and tomatoes, eggplant and onions and squash. Haru brings her harvest in and seeds the garden for spring.

She started gardening because it was one tiny thing she could control when she had no hold over her life. Plants ask nothing of you but nurture, and Haru has plenty of that to give. She came to love the little things, though: the feeling of cool dirt slipping between her fingers, the way some plants bend and others prickle, the bees that visit her while she works because there’s food for them here. Imagine! She’s already running a tiny cafe out of her own backyard.

She’s just laying the covers down to protect the patch through winter when her phone rings from the pocket of her sweater. She wipes her hands on a rag so she can answer it.

“Hello?”

“Haru, good afternoon.” Its President Takakura. “I hope I’m not interrupting you.”

“Not at all,” Haru replies brightly. “In fact, I was just finishing up.”

“Were you working in your garden?”

“Yes!” She perches her phone in the juncture between her ear and her shoulder so she can put everything away while she works. “I just brought in my harvest and the vegetable patch is all ready for winter. I’ll set some aside for you.”

“That’s truly not necessary,” he protests.

“Please, I insist.”

The wonderful thing about owning your whole heart is knowing you’re allowed to be stubborn.

“I can hardly refuse your generosity,” he says. Haru giggles. “I had an opportunity to look over the proposal you sent me.”

Haru’s heart leaps into her throat. It’s not nerves precisely, because she’s confident in her plan; she’s argued it back and forth with Makoto, with Akira, even with Sae and Boss. But when you put your whole heart into a thing, it tends to act up on its own accord.

“Thank you for taking the time,” she demurs, smoothing out her skirt. “What did you think?”

“It’s very ambitious,” he says. “Not that that’s a bad thing, but I think we would do best with a bit of circumspection. That being said, I do think that with some modifications, it’s an actionable plan. I’d like to bring it before the board. When would you be available?”

They make plans and say goodbye and when they’re finished Haru hangs up with giddy delight. She dials Makoto with jittery fingers.

“Hi,” Makoto answers breathlessly. From the background noise, she must be at the gym. “Sorry, could you hold on for a second?”

She holds on for a second. She holds on for several seconds and contains her excitement by sorting through the vegetables in the kitchen. When Makoto’s voice returns she keeps on sorting, because it doesn’t make sense to stop a task that needs doing when it’s already been started.

“Sorry,” Makoto says. “I’m at the gym and I didn’t want to get my phone all sweaty. Is everything okay?”

“President Takakura liked the proposal!” The words leave her in an excited burst. “I’m meeting with the board next Thursday!”

“That’s amazing!” Makoto’s voice is liquid sunshine; it curls up in Haru’s belly, warming her up from the inside. “I _knew_ you had it in the hole.”

They make plans to meet up for dinner. Sae will be home tonight, and Haru enjoys going over and cooking for both of them. It feels homey. For years and years Haru ate alone, meals made by hired help who weren’t there to hold her. Father was busy, and busy, and busier, and near the end he wanted nothing of Haru unless he got something for himself in return.

Picking up the pieces after loss is like gardening: you have to prune the feelings that threaten to choke you and nurture the ones you want to grow. Haru has a girlfriend she’s over the moon for and is on the precipice of making her dreams reality, and for the first time in her life she is incandescently happy. She’s grown her happiness from a seed, a carefully planted promise of life. She’s watered it and shaped it, nourished it in rich dark earth and cut away the rot before decay could set in; she took a sapling and taught it how to bloom.

She’ll have so much to tell her father the next time she sees him.

* * *

> **Akira:** sorry I might be late today  
>  **Akira:** Takemi just texted me  
>  **Goro:** Takemi?  
> [ seen XX:XX]  
>  **Goro:** hello?  
> [ seen XX:XX]  
>  **Akira:** sorry  
>  **Akira:** she brought her patient for me to meet  
>  **Akira:** takemi’s my doctor. kinda. kinda not a doctor.  
>  **Goro:** “Kinda” not a doctor?  
>  **Akira:** complicated  
>  **Akira:** but I got to see miwa-chan today  
>  **Akira:** that’s her patient  
>  **Akira:** do you know what it feels like to see sunflowers?  
>  **Goro:** I’ll assume you’re speaking in metaphor--  
>  **Akira:** basically yes  
>  **Goro:** I’ve seen  
>  **Goro:** please disregard that  
>  **Goro:** I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you mean  
>  **Akira:** it’s basically like  
>  **Akira:** when someone smiles and it just lifts up your entire being  
>  **Goro:** I can't ever say that I've felt that way  
>  **Akira:** I feel it  
>  **Akira:** all the time

* * *

Sojiro takes a long sip of the coffee and lets it sit on his tongue--Guatemala FNV, roasted just dark enough to draw out the cherry. Brewed almost to perfection, even by his own exacting standards.

“Not bad, kid,” he says. Akira rubs the back of his neck and grins.

Sojiro’s long since resigned himself to half his regulars being wet behind the ears, because that’s what happens when you adopt one kid and take in another: they bring along their friends. That their friends are more colorful than the cartoons Futaba watches--well, that’s not surprising, given everything.

Case in point, three of them in the booth by the stairs: his shut-in, the talking cat, and the retired teenaged hitman. His juvenile delinquent brings plates of curry over to the table. “My treat,” he tells Akechi as he sets a plate in front of him, to immediate protest.

“I’m perfectly capable of paying for my own food--”

“I know,” Akira says. “My treat anyway.”

Futaba cuts Akechi off before he can argue further. “Play a card, Kaiba. You’re holding up the game.”

They’re playing Ninety-Nine. Apparently Akechi has an extensive mental repertoire of card games. Akira’s fluid as water and will adapt himself to anything, and Futaba--

Futaba is talking to Akechi like any other person. Maybe a bit more abrasively, a little insulated behind walls no one can see, but he can tell when she’s making an effort. He doesn’t know why it surprises him. She’s tough and she always has been: she never broke, no matter how hard the world tried to shatter her. 

“I like octopi,” she said once on a visit to the aquarium. They stood in front of the octopus tank, watching the eight-limbed strangers push themselves with nimble grace through the water. “Did you know even the largest species can squeeze through openings as small as 2.5 centimeters in diameter? I feel like that all the time.”

It’s a Futaba kind of thing to say, making herself a microcosm of the world to talk about her own feelings. Sojiro’s not stupid, but both of his kids talk on a level he can’t meet halfway. But he tries for their sake, because they’re worth it. Futaba talks about sea creatures and Sojiro can read the meaning layered under the words: she’s too big for the world to handle, but there’s no obstacle it can put in front of her that she can’t squeeze her tiny self through.

She’s so much like Wakaba, and Sojiro knows none of the credit goes to him. He misses Wakaba with an ache that goes deeper than grief. The proudest thing anyone can call him is Futaba’s father.

* * *

Sojiro and Futaba leave, and Akira whiles away the quiet few hours until closing with another chess rematch against Goro. Akira almost won last time, and Goro watches each movement of his hand with hawkish interest. Akira makes him another coffee, something sweet and complex in a formula he learned years ago by rote.

You can tell a lot about a person by how they take their coffee. What Akira knows about Goro is this: he’s reserved to the point of taciturn, but full enough of anger to act with violence when pressed. He knows he’s probably the smartest person he’s met, save Futaba and maybe Makoto, but never learned to process what’s in his own heart. He knows--he’s sure--Goro feels about Akira in some way that’s not dissimilar from how Akira feels about him. The way static electricity feels, all the nerves in his skin reaching for the promise of connection.

All Akira wants is time spent together and a conversation.

The movie Akira puts on is an old sentai classic, at least according to Futaba. Goro looks like he has a lot of quiet judgement to cast in that regard, and that’s only something else that digs its way under Akira’s skin. They sit, facing the TV, side by side on Akira’s bed, the air between them crackling with electricity; Akira wonders if, and is almost sure, that Goro feels it too. 

He can tell from the way their fingers brush together in accidental symmetry.

Akira can’t put what he wants into words. He’s more of a doer than thinker, more of an actor than a dreamer. What Akira knows is that any time they accidentally bump shoulders, they pull away in perfect harmony. Both too aware of the other. You’re not supposed to feel this way about someone who tried to hurt you, but Akira has never felt anything anything other than want where Goro is concerned. 

After the movie ends they sit together in companionable silence, browsing their phones while the credits roll and the ending music plays. Occasionally their elbows bump together, and the contact always makes Akira’s skin fizz pleasantly.

“Do you remember when we met?” Akira asks. He’s swiping through photos on his phone: pictures of Morgana, of latte art, the occasional selfie because Ann insists that of her mutuals. When he gets to the photos from vacation, he slows down to take each one in. Seeing Goro in them feels like a hole in the group has been filled. He remembers when they met down to the tiniest detail, the first day and the day after. The way Goro’s hand had felt in his: even then, not knowing, Akira had hated gloves.

“I remember,” Goro says. “It was at a TV station, though I can’t remember which one. They all started to blur together after the first few guest spots. It’s embarrassing to remember what I was like on those programs.”

“You were kind of obnoxious,” Akira says, catching Goro’s eye and smiling warmly to take the bite out of it. Goro ducks his head, embarrassed. “What did you say to me? Something about thesis--”

“Thesis and antithesis--there can’t be one without the other.” Goro tugs on a lock of fawn-brown hair in chagrin. “That you put up with me despite all that is still...baffling.”

He means the pretensions and the arguing, the quiet jibes and casual self-importance, but he means the other things too--the ugly and monstrous things, gunfire and blades and blood. Akira can see disquiet sitting in the shadows of his eyes.

“I never held any of it against you.”

Akira touches his hand; Goro looks up at him, startled. There’s that vulnerable look, the hunted-deer look that makes Akira want to hold him.

“None of it,” Akira says, lifting Goro’s hand and lacing their fingers together so he can feel his skin, palm against palm, just like a quiet night on a quiet beach in August, where they were just two boys who wanted the same thing: each other. “You can’t hate your other half.”

“That’s--” Goro starts, stops, swallows. The apple in his throat bobs; there's another hunted-deer shadow lurking in his eyes, but his grip on Akira’s hand is bruising. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

Akira lifts his other hand to tuck a loose strand of hair behind Goro’s ear. He brushes a thumb across the soft skin beneath his eye.

“Yes you do,” Akira says. “You said it first. You said it years ago.”

He leans in, and Goro doesn’t lean away. He stares at Akira, transfixed, until Akira kisses him, and then his eyes drift closed.

His lips are chapped and soft. Akira can still taste the coffee on them from earlier, the sweetest hint of cream. He lifts a hand to thread it through the fine hair falling around Goro’s face, leans in and in and feels Goro leaning back until he has to brace himself against the mattress to keep from pressing him down. How did it take them so long to get here? Three years, twenty years, a thousand--Akira doesn’t believe in fate, but some things are inevitable. Hunger is inevitable. Gravity is inevitable. They’ve always been twin celestial bodies locked in each other’s orbit, and Akira is falling, falling--

Goro parts his lips against the gentle press of Akira’s tongue and makes a small noise in the back of his throat that reverberates into Akira’s mouth, sending sparks jittering across his skin. Goro’s hair is soft between his fingers, and as Akira licks against Goro’s tongue Goro lifts a hand to fist in the cotton of Akira’s shirt, pulling hard--and then abruptly pushing him away.

They break apart gasping. Akira’s head is reeling, spun out of orbit. He looks at Goro, mussed hair, mussed clothes, mouth red and eyes bright and splintering.

“What,” Goro gasps between breaths, “what the _hell_ do you think you’re doing?”

“Goro--” Akira starts, reaching for him. Goro snatches his hand away like Akira’s is something burning.

“I can’t--” His voice cracks. He jerks up off the bed and turns away. “I have to go. Please don’t text me. Good night.”

Akira stares as he makes for the stairs at a speed just a hair shy of running. He sits on his bed, punch-drunk and his mind still spinning-spinning-spinning, as he hears the front door unlock, and open, and latch quietly closed.

The only sounds in the attic are the static from the TV and his own wildly pounding heart.

 _What just happened?_ he wonders. Did he misread? He can’t have misread. Goro didn’t pull away. He kissed him back. He was into it, Akira knows he was, so what happened?

 _He thinks I don’t care_ , he’d told Lala when Goro was still hiding, a needle in a haystack of nine million people refusing to be found. _Probably he thinks I never did._

“Shit,” Akira says, scrambling off his bed and grabbing a hoodie from the couch. “Shit,” he says again, stubbing his toe while he shoves on his shoes. “ _Fuck_ ,” he utters, grabbing his keys off the ledge near the stairs and taking them two at a time as he runs across the tiny length of the cafe and through the door.

The rain outside is coming down in sheets. He fumbles with his keys beneath the awning, locks the front door, and looks both ways down the little alley where Leblanc sits.

 _Left or right?_ he thinks. _Left or right?_

They’re the same. They’re the same. _They’re the same._ And Akira knows that if he doesn’t follow him now, he’ll disappear for good this time.

He picks a direction and takes off running.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Espressino_ is a coffee drink made using Nutella and cocoa powder. I didn't use it in this chapter JUST because I'm Italian (Goro would genuinely love Nutella), but it does make me more powerful.
> 
> I wanted this chapter to be perfect. It is not perfect, but my lizard brain wants instant validation more strongly than it wants what I write to be untouchable. In the end all I wanted was for these boys to kiss, and maybe make it mean something.


	26. Chapter 26

_The hum of the elevator is too loud; it keeps cutting through his thoughts like a live wire. He needs to think. He needs not to think._

_Four more floors. Three. Two. One._

_The elevator bell dings as the doors open. Goro steps through into a hallway that’s as desolate as any other place he’s been in the system--concrete walls, steel doors. Goro counts off the doors that taper off to his left, one, two, three, four, five, and a corner that Sae steps around, looking shaken and stirred in every measure._

_“Akechi-kun,” she says when she spots him, her right hand fiddling with her phone. “Why are you here?”_

_She’s offended that he’s worked his way into her place. Well is her right, but well is his. She recovers herself and hands him a phone, smirking as if she knows something. Sae doesn’t know anything. Sae is as much of a piece in this game as he is. Goro is the white knight; Goro will topple the black king. But first---_

_The door at the end of the hallway looms. Goro knows who’s inside. Just a boy, a person of no great import. A boy with dark hair and steel eyes, with quick hands, a sharp mind, razor wit. A boy who’s the closest thing Goro has ever felt to having an equal, to having a partner, and yet--_

_It’s a game. It’s a challenge. They’re players on opposite sides of the board, and Goro is the one who has to win. That his partner thought he could challenge him is delightful, but Goro knows you have to sacrifice the cards in your hand to make your play. He smiles at the guard when he takes his gun, smiles as he puts a bullet in his head. When he looks down at Akira--at Joker--he sees the way all of the bruises shadow his bright grey eyes._

_There are miles between them. Goro hates them, he tells himself; he hates the way Akira can make himself the center of anyone’s room, the easy way he wormed himself into Goro’s life. Akira is gunfire and starlight all at once. There’s only one way to escape him._

_He lifts his gun and levels the muzzle between Akira's eyes. He doesn’t know how he’ll survive this, after._

_But this is a game he can’t not win._

_The gun kicks back into his palm when he pulls the trigger._

  


* * *

  
  


There are things that Goro isn’t allowed to have.

The world is unjust and that’s just the way it works. When you fuck up the way he has, in the worst way possible, there are things you have no right to.

His mouth burns. His hand burns. The skin below his eye burns. Despite the rain he feels as if his hair is on fire.

It takes a certain kind of fucked-up person to fall in love with someone, and to put a gun to their head and pull the trigger. It takes a certain kind of fucked-up person to still want them after.

Goro is fundamentally skilled at one thing--lying--and the greatest lies are the ones you tell yourself. He’d done such a good job of pretending it wasn’t there. Ignoring inconvenient feelings was how he’d stumbled into every jackpot he’s ever found himself in.

The first person he turned Loki’s sword on was himself, after all.

He takes the train to Shibuya and transfers to the Yamanote line. The city is as quiet as it ever can be, and at this late hour Goro is a fly on the wall to the other passengers’ quiescent little nighttime dramas that reflect his own empty joke of a life back at him. See there, the tired-eyed woman in stiletto heels and a too-tight dress, likely working hand to mouth just to keep her own child fed. See there, the teenager sleeping on the train, the lines of loneliness etched in the unhappy twist of his mouth and between his pinched brows. See there, the young couple at the far end of the car too caught up with one another in public, with roving hands and hungry mouths-- _No._

He jerks his gaze away.

“Chiyoda-ku,” the announcer calls out from the speakers overhead, “Chiyoda-ku. Next stop, Tokyo Station.”

Goro stands abruptly and turns to leave.

The streets of Chiyoda aren’t empty, not even at night, because the day’s business may be over but there are still deals to be done in the dark. The Yamanote districts glitter with the polish of the affluent and Akihabara is as noisy as it ever is, but the further south he gets the more the noise dies away. At this time of night the heart of the ward, where the Imperial Palace lies, will be still and beating softly. Goro’s footsteps carry him south and east, to Nagatacho-icchome and what stands within it.

The Diet Building looms into the dark sky above him, that place where mostly men and fewer women decide whose lives matter and whose lives don’t. Its shadow hangs over Goro like the blade of a guillotine, a hungry thing that waits to swallow him whole. It knows the same thing he does: this was meant to be his grave.

Not this street, perhaps, but this point of cosmic reality, this root of rapacity and lust for power. This place where his father’s heart once rested, secure within its walls, where a ship cast off anchor and set sail on the tides of greed.

It was on that ship that Goro was meant to meet his end.

Having the threads of his existence cut that way would have been so much simpler. Easier than the ugliness and the emptiness and the pain. Easier to embrace death, as he’d done for years. He’s dug more graves for other people than he can count; what’s one extra for him to lie down in, six feet below the level ground?

When Goro was fourteen he woke up to a stentorian voice in his dreams telling him that he was special. That he had a destiny. That he was _chosen_. Goro had never been chosen by anyone for anything, but this voice had told him that he had power beyond imagination. It had promised him that what he wanted most could be his.

What he’d wanted was to rage, and he’d done just that. He’d tasted power for the first time in his life and decided what he wanted most to do with it was smash things.

Here is the thing they don’t tell you about firearms: every weapon kicks back. The greater the force of the shot, the harder the recoil. You feel the bullet too, in your own way.

Here is the thing they don’t tell you about pain: you carry as much of it as you cause, and more. What they don’t tell you about subtle knives is this: they cut both ways.

He stares up at the Diet Building; he knows the charnel pit at its center and longs for it, but his heart knows that’s not his place.

Goro sees the building’s hungry lines. He wants it to say something about him. He wants it to condemn him. He knows it won’t. It can’t. It’s just bricks and mortar at the end of the day. The place where Goro should have died evaporated years ago. It was a spill against the human animus, and Goro was less than a drip upon the water. He knows his father occupies a cell roughly six feet by eight in measure, and the cell trapping Goro holds the shape of the entire world.

He knows this isn’t the place for him, so he keeps on walking. The rain has seeped through his clothes and plasters them against his skin, like deep-sea creatures with suckers and too-many limbs. His shirt clings to his chest. His pants hug his legs. He has no gloves and he feels a chill setting in, crawling its way deeper and deeper until he’s shuffling with every step.

There’s nowhere else to go so eventually he finds himself in Hibiya Park. This close to the palace it’s empty: no sane reason to be here, in the dark of the night and the cold September rain. Goro traces his steps up and down the park’s lanes, searching for something he won’t find. Rain is falling. The park is empty. He’s alone, alone, alone.

That’s how it’s supposed to be.

What now? He can’t remain in Tokyo. Would the courts consent to allowing him to move? He sits on a bench and tries to think but all he can do is stare at the way raindrops strike the paved walkway like pennies and shatter into smaller drops.

“Hey.” His voice is quiet, layered with subtlety and command. Goro won’t look. Goro won’t look. Goro won’t _look_ \-- “I thought I’d find you here.”

He sees a pair of sneakers on the pavement in front of him, traces the heavy lines of rain-sodden jeans clinging to legs hiding muscles that wish not to be known. Goro looks up to see Akira; Akira looks down at him with a bare face, his glasses hidden somewhere out of sight. He’s never needed them to see anything, much less the things that shouldn’t be seen.

“How did you find me?” Goro asks. His voice cracks over the next question: “ _Why_?”

“When I couldn’t find you in Yongen I figured you’d go to the Diet Building,” Akira says, “and this is nearby. And as for why... Why wouldn't I?”

It’s raining so hard that sitting on anything means sitting in water. Akira drops down onto the bench beside him without caring, one arm thrown along the back of the bench in the space where Goro’s shoulders would be if he weren’t hunched in on himself. He thinks of Akira touching him, pale fingers tracing pale skin, and shudders.

None of this is fair.

Goro needs to go, needs to get out of this before it goes anywhere else that’s ugly and outside of his control. He jolts upright and finds himself held fast, hand in hand with an anchor.

“Don’t go.” Akira’s voice is pleading. His palm is warm against Goro’s own, his fingers wrapped around Goro’s hand in a grip that’s too inviting. He’s felt those fingers. He felt them on his face, in his hair. Fingers that know how to hold a gun but have touched Goro gently, regardless. He feels the way Akira’s fingers press into his skin and--

“Please don’t go,” Akira says again, holding fast against the tide.

Goro doesn’t want to see what that looks like, doesn’t want to see Akira filled with _wanting_. He wants it anyway and hates himself all the more. What’s wrong with them? What’s wrong with both of them? How does anyone, anyone find themselves at this point?

Goro clings to Akira’s hand and doesn’t let go.

“You have a problem,” he starts.

“I know,” Akira says.

“No--” Goro chokes on his words, coughs, starts again. “ _No_. Shut up.”

Akira is silent as Goro continues.

“When I was fourteen,” he says, “I heard a voice in my ear. It told me I was special. It taught me how to get my own revenge. It wanted things--”

The rain spills relentlessly down from the open wound of the sky. The cold has cut through the thin fabric of Goro’s clothes. He tightens his grip on Akira’s hand, feels Akira stagger up towards him.

“I wanted violence,” Goro says into the dark. “I wanted other people to hurt, and I didn’t care--And then you just appeared, so easily--”

Goro has been alone for longer than he can remember. He’s tried for longer than he can remember, too. He’s always been there, taking up space that wasn’t wanted, and then one day another boy shook his hand and saw him, really _saw_ him, and Goro has been untethered ever since.

“--and then I put a gun to your head and I pulled the trigger, and maybe it wasn’t really you, but to me it was you, and for a moment I was _glad_ , and that’s--that’s so fucked up, and you’re here holding my hand--”

“I’m here.” Akira says it like a promise. To hold to that, he squeezes Goro’s hand. “I’m not letting go.”

Goro is a pinion in the rain. He can feel himself shaking to pieces, and not just from the cold.

“I killed Futaba's mother,” he starts, and then the words just keep on coming. “I killed Haru's father too. They’re not the only ones. I’ve smashed up the lives of people who deserve it and people who don’t. I’ve killed people. I’ve _killed_ people. What the fuck is--”

He’s cut off by the press of Akira’s index finger against his lips. He hates that his first instinct is to open his mouth and let Akira press his finger in.

“When I was sixteen,” Akira says, “this long-nosed guy told me I had power, and my gym teacher was a problem.” That’s such an over-simplification. Goro knows what happened, knows the specifics down to the letter. “And I was so _angry_. I’d been sent away like somebody’s dirty secret and shitty adults were everywhere, abusing people who couldn’t fight back. The only difference between me and you is just a flip of the coin. The first time we stole someone’s heart, we didn’t know if he’d survive it. I told myself I was okay with being a murderer if that's what I had to be.”

His words sink into Goro, a counterweight to his shaking. “It’s not the same thing. You may have stumbled, but you never fell. I don’t deserve to be forgiven.”

“This isn’t about forgiveness.” Akira laces the fingers of his free hand with Goro’s. “It’s not even about paying back what you owe. You’re allowed to have things. Good things, even. And I want to be one of them.”

Is it truly that simple? Goro knows, in theory, that you’re not supposed to measure hurts against each other, yours or other people’s, but he can’t stop himself from doing just that. Does he really have that right? To be happy? To be wanted?

To allow himself to love, and to be loved in turn?

 _No_ , he thinks. _I don’t have a right to anything_.

And yet--and yet…

They’re so close. Akira is the warmest thing in this wide cold world, a burning force of nature. Goro leans in and kisses him, a small thing, a chaste thing, just the merest brush of lips. He rests his forehead on Akira’s shoulder and lets Akira hold him as he finally lets himself fall.

He may not deserve it, but he wants it all the same.

“Come home with me.” Akira rubs his palm in gentle circles on Goro’s back, cards the fingers of his other hand through Goro’s hair. “Goro. Come home.”

He has to stop shaking first, but eventually he does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We finally got there, kids.


	27. Chapter 27

Where does the delineation lie between a house and a home?

The distinction has existed as far back as the roots of language can be traced, but why? Why discriminate a house from an abide, a dwelling, an abode, a domicile, a home?

A house is, if anything, just an object: a physical edifice made of bricks and mortar, or else hard concrete or solid timber, with glass-paned windows through which to peer, outside or in. Floors firm, walls joined neatly, doors kept quietly shut, with a roof overhead to shelter those beneath it from the cold, the snow, the rain. But home--home is a place as much as an object, a feeling as much as a location. Home is nothing less than harbor given safely. In that way home can be more than a fixed point of geography: home can be a person, a feeling, a poem. 

Home can be feeling held for the first time.

That Leblanc is the only place that has ever given the kind of comfort a home is said to provide is a thing he’d long since accepted without much question. At first he could be alone there with his thoughts, a thing he’d craved when he was enough of a household name that strangers would interrupt him wherever he went; it was quaint and out of the way and it didn’t boast so much as augur an atmosphere of modest hospitality. If later it became the nucleus of everything that Goro strove for, and so much more besides, well--the heart is a fickle creature, and prone to wanting.

Other people are drawn to Leblanc for the same reason that Goro is: it is the center of Akira Kurusu’s life, and he wants to be as much a part of it as the rest of them. Wants it more.

For years and years Goro has wanted things: intangible things, impossible things, vicious things, barbed-wire things. A lonely child is full of wants, but mostly what they want is just for someone to hold them.

_You’re allowed to have things. Good things, even._

He’s spent so long closing himself off from the world in every way that made it safe for him to be in it. Is it any wonder that the smallest hint of tenderness should make him fall to pieces?

* * *

First loves are almost always ugly, but rarely do they involve attempted murder. Attempted twice over, even. 

There was a time that the only one who listened to him was Loki, and if it’s your own self listening then does it really count? But at least Loki would fill up the lonely spaces where silence lay, the yawning emptiness between Goro’s fervent wish to be seen and the misanthropic eye he cast on everyone else around him. Loki had moods, which he’d learned to read. He was quick to laughter and quicker to rage, every lurch of his feelings in the direction of an extreme. He was a festering wound in the center of Goro’s mind that he couldn’t help but keep tracking back to, like a tongue probing at the space where a missing tooth should be.

 _Have you finally welcomed the dead-end where discernment lies?_ Loki had whispered that first time in his ear. _Are you now ready to deliver the reckoning this world deserves?_

Loki laughed when Goro shook Akira’s hand. _This one is trouble_ , he’d warned, and he wasn’t wrong. Robin Hood rose soon after, golden and gleaming, reminding Goro that he had a conscience no matter how deeply and how brutally he tried, over and over, to bury it.

 _This is not justice_ , Robin cautioned to Goro during those sleepless November nights. Okumura had melted out from the inside for a live television audience, and he was so _close_ to getting Shido where he wanted him: what else was he supposed to do?

 _Justice?_ Loki had laughed. _What is justice, pray tell? A level knife? Or the bold hand that wields it?_

Akira was a deft hand with level knives. He was a deft hand at everything, given a learning curve in any degree. He still is because he has the knack for adaptation in the living second, more fluid than liquid and just as impossible to contain. He’s a quiet shadow who slips his way through the background, invisible until he wants not to be. Dark hair and steel eyes with glasses to hide behind, his shoulders slightly hunched to lessen the likelihood of being noticed, and it worked--you could lose him in a crowd if you didn’t know to be looking for him in the first place. All of that to cover up razor wit, a soft heart, and a burning rage that Goro felt the echo of melting the marrow in his bones. 

He’d watched Akira all through Sae’s palace, watched with too-much interest the way he’d trick-flip a knife into the air and catch it in its downfall between his fingers with careless grace, Loki laughing all the while where only he could hear. In an interrogation room deep below the ground, Loki’s laughter flipped easily into rage.

He’s hated himself for too long of a while.

Goro doesn’t know at what point curiosity became affection, when fascination became something softer, an almost painfully tender yearning. He doesn’t know at what moment, the exact day and time down to the second, that he fell in love. That seems like a thing you should be able to catalogue, like having your throat cut, just that fast. They call it _falling_ for a reason: the sharp drop, the crash at the end, the whisper-promise of breaking. 

He fell, and that’s the peculiar part--sometimes when you fall there’s someone there to catch you at the bottom in spite of it all.

* * *

Goro wakes, not in his usual sudden lurch to consciousness, but slowly, warmth creeping into his skin, his sinew, sinking down into the very marrow of his bones. He can make out the glimmer of early-morning sunlight through his eyelids, and when he blinks them open, squinting through the soft buttery glow, he realizes he’s not in his own bed and memory comes back all at once, making his heart race and his face warm.

He’d let Akira lead him, hand in gentle hand, back to Leblanc, had stood there dripping on the hardwood as Akira shut off the machines and the lights and locked the front door. Upstairs he’d pulled dry clothes out and handed them to Goro, and Goro had found the prospect of standing there and undressing in front of him in that singular moment so embarrassing he’d fled to the bathroom to change. And then he’d climbed the stairs again and let Akira guide him like a child into bed.

He doesn’t know--he can’t recall--the last time he slept through the night so easily.

Akira’s face is softer in sleep, all of the careful calculation he hides behind faded away into something utterly without guile. He’s on his back, his left arm thrown over his chest so his fingers just brush the comforter trailing from Goro’s shoulder, and his chest rises and falls with the gentle rhythm of the ocean as he breathes--a thing Goro once tried to stop and, miraculously, failed.

He pushes the comforter aside to brush his fingers against the line of Akira’s jaw; when Akira’s eyes open, he jerks his hand away. Akira reacquaints himself with consciousness and turns his head to look at Goro, frozen between him and the wall, and Akira smiles, eyes warm. 

“Hey,” Akira says softly.

There’s something tight in Goro’s throat where air should be, cutting off all of his words; it taps out the staccato rhythm of a drum.

“Hello,” he eventually manages, once he’s forced his heart back down into his chest cavity where it rightly belongs. 

Akira rolls onto his side so they’re facing each other, a matching pair of parentheses, and lifts a hand to Goro’s face, giving him enough space to flinch away or refuse the contact before he traces his thumb along Goro’s cheekbone and threads his fingers into the ends of his hair. Akira leans in, brushes his mouth against Goro’s; Goro lets his eyes drift closed and breathes, and breathes, and breathes.

* * *

_What are we?_ Akira asks in a moment that feels frozen, suspended in time, his eyes bright and his mouth easy.

Goro doesn’t know how to answer. He knows he could find the words in his vocabulary if he went looking for them, but he’s not sure that he has the necessary craft to string them together.

_What would you like us to be?_

Akira smiles a smile that makes Goro’s pulse quicken and his blood warm.

_You and me against the world._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Get your minds out of the gutter! Nothing exciting happened!
> 
> The Tenderness this chapter was NOT actually inspired by [this](https://todoyamas.tumblr.com/post/187549225363/aftermath) absolutely holy fanart, but I saw this a couple of months after I knew how that scene was going to play out and I was like IT'S SHRIKE???? We all just want tenderness in this shipdom. I can't believe it took me like two weeks to write this chapter considering the second half of it has been written for like........a month and a half? The big challenge was finding a way to integrate those scenes into the overall narrative.
> 
> I've only spent the last like THREE MONTHS trying to get to this point and that everyone reading this has hung out with me along the way just makes me feel so Lifted. Specific thank-yous to Krist, who is as ever my savior just for giving me a space to talk about my ideas, and every single one of you. Thank you thank you thank you.
> 
> I can't believe I finally got here aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh thank you all so much for your support. 😭


	28. Chapter 28

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ohhhhhhhhh my gosh I am _so_ sorry for how long this chapter has taken me. It was really hard for me to write and on top of that this past month I've been hit by personal stuff, the holidays, everything at work being on fire--you name it, it's happened.
> 
> Thank you for your patience. I hope it's worth the wait!

One storm-raging night and one quiet morning after bring with them countless changes.

Touch, for example. Touch is a thing Goro is unaccustomed to, has shielded himself from like a child burned one too many times on a hot stove--and something he’s now finding that he hungers for like water, or like air. There’s something about the physical contact of another person, consciously initiated, that feels wanted, and needed, and almost too much. Akira is casually, deliberately tactile, and a brush of shoulders or the merest touch of a hand to the low of his back burns through the thin fabric of his shirt and leaves him feeling branded--and yet in even the tiniest moments away, he misses the gentle weight of another’s body leaning into his.

If Akira is careful with his touch, he’s open-handed with his affection. _Miss you_ , he texts when Goro leaves to go back to his apartment to wash up and go to work, and the next time they see each other the palpable warmth in Akira’s eyes makes something in his stomach turn in on itself in a way that’s both uncomfortable and not. He’s patient beyond comprehension and considerate above all else, but when they’re alone Goro can see the glint in Akira’s eye that’s more Joker than anything and in those moments it only makes Goro feel even dizzier. There’s a greed in Akira that’s impossible to match, a greed Goro feels hooking into the tendons pulling on his every bone.

Want, too, is new, as is being wanted. Akira kisses him easily and Goro comes up each time gasping for air like a man drowning. He feels stupid for never before registering how pretty Akira is. He’d been aware of it in the vaguest sense, in that a part of Goro has always catalogued other people’s appearances to measure them against his own for judgement, but now he sees it every time he looks at him. The angled lines of his face and the soft curve of his nose, the way his hair falls over his ears in messy curls; his grey eyes track to Goro when he realizes that he’s looking, twin windows to a fall sky heavy with cloud. Goro feels the back of his neck heat at the regard but he refuses to look away, glaring back in turn instead--and that’s just as bad because it makes Akira smile, with dimples in his cheeks and just the barest flash of teeth, a thief at the window with his target in sight.

That his target is Goro--that what he truly wants is Goro--that’s another thing for him to deal with, in the frantic spaces fumbling between the politeness he’s always acted on and the bluntness he prefers, the way Akira’s mouth fixes on his, warm and pliable and insistent.

  


* * *

  


He leaves it to Akira to tell the others and mutes the group chat preemptively, which saves him not at all from the likes of Ann Takamaki because Goro is a master of half-baked plans and direct messaging is a thing that exists in spite of any fervent wish he might have. _congratulations!!!!_ she texts him, followed by an obnoxious number of emojis and fanatical effusing over the chance for double dates. Goro takes one look at the word _date_ , feels panic bubbling up inside himself, and immediately mutes her too. It’s like he’s suspended in a state of perpetual free-fall, gravity pulling him down and down and down while the wind whistles past his ears. _Is this what normal people feel like?_ he wonders. _Is this what normal is?_ Normal isn’t a thing he has reference for.

“Ann gets over the top about anything that excites her.” Akira rolls his eyes. “Ignoring her is usually my preferred method of dealing with it unless she starts throwing things.”

“And when she does that?” Goro asks him.

Akira laughs, the quiet baritone of the sound mesmerizing. The sunlight catches his laughter and magnifies it; Goro studies the sight and the sound and tucks them both carefully away in his memory. He finds he’s doing that now: building a photo album in his mind in living motion, a reel of microfilm he can slowly unspool again and again and again. “Then I sic Shiho on her. That usually does the trick.”

And that’s another thread for him to untangle: the peculiarly intimate nature of Akira’s friendship with a woman he once dated, a woman who broke up with him for someone else. It’s not jealousy that Goro feels--there’s that too, muted like the itch in the skin around a healing wound--so much as confusion at the easy nature of a friendship that survived heartbreak, a thing he’d always inferred was supposedly unsurvivable.

Akira lifts an eyebrow at that and gives him a wry smile. He holds out his hand, another small magnet Goro can’t help but be drawn to; he slides his palm against Akira’s, his touch almost shy, and Akira--Akira _beams_ at him with all the brightness of the sun.

“If you want to put it that way, I think you and I survived a lot worse than that.”

  


* * *

  


Back in his apartment, Goro is alone. He’s surrounded by a space built around the idea of people occupying it but the only person he can think of is Akira: the feeling of waking up beside him, the way terrifying isolation had crystallized into something like safety, what it feels like to have a hand in his, a hungry mouth on his, fingers combing through his hair in a way that was good for the first time in years.

Carrying himself through the day is immeasurably harder after that. His apartment feels desolate than ever upon his return. From the corner of his eye he sees: the specter of Akira cooking in the kitchen, Futaba curled up on a chair at the kitchen table with her laptop in front of her, Ann laughing brightly from where the others in the living room are watching something nonsensical on TV. The cat walking through the rooms, twining itself between legs and ducking beneath open hands. The cat that’s only a cat when it’s convenient for it. 

“Did something happen?” Ms Kitamura asks him that afternoon. He’s been neglecting the book rebinding project, and it’s entirely because of his focus on that project that he doesn’t look up to meet her eyes.

 _Something_ happened, certainly--some many things, a sequence of events with the inevitability of falling domino tiles stacked in a row. The memory of glimmering morning sunlight and a warm embrace creeps up on him at the most inopportune moments. “Nothing in particular,” he says evenly, shuttering that new-jewel memory away to revisit when he’s alone again.

Ms Kitamura hums thoughtfully. “Well, if you say so. I just thought...you look happy today. I’m glad.”

He looks happy? Does he? More importantly: is he? He’s certainly--something. Happiness is an alien thing, a feeling he recalls only distantly from half-faded memories of a mother who tried her best but could never provide as much as a mother should. Aquinas is the least of the philosophers to his mind, more priest than sophist, but at least he interrogated the emotion directly. That balancing intellectual and moral virtues being bullshit notwithstanding--Goro respects the idealists and the rationalists in equal measure--Aquinas, for all his trash arguments, tried to answer the age-old question of happiness.

The feelings Goro comprehends most easily are the saw-edged ones: anger, grief, anxiety, pain. Delight isn’t a feeling, nor is surprise; both are states of being, transitory and temporary. What he feels when he thinks of Akira is--

( _He has dreamed before of a world unchained. He’s dreamed of touching him. If the world is a game then let him be the best left bower. Let him hold all of the cards and break all of the rules. It’s not touch alone that matters, nor the desire to do so, but more the wanting, the incalculable human need for arms secure around him, for a hand held in his. He’s dreamed of a face shadowed in a dark curtain, of eyes that see too much, of a mouth just as greedy as--greedier even than--the charnel pit he keeps locked away behind the martial lines of his teeth_.)

\--a hunger so vast it’s an open wound. If Akira has awakened anything, it’s that there’s something inside of Goro that’s full of teeth and too much hunger. The awakening after living deprived of affection for so long is a reckoning indeed. The miscast heart is a creature of appetence.

He arrives readily at Leblanc that night with an overnight bag slung over his shoulder, but at the door he can’t make himself go in. He rests one hand on the doorknob, the metal cooling as the sun fades away. It’s stupid. He feels presumptuous. He’s intruding. The thought comes to him again that he doesn’t deserve to want any of this, much less have it, and again and again and again he hears Akira’s voice in his mind battening the thought away.

Inside, Sakura looks at him steadily from across the bar, one finger curled in the thinning, greying hair of his goatee. “I hear you’ve been spending the night.” There’s no innuendo or insinuation to his voice, but Goro can hear the carefully masked question mark at the end regardless. 

Goro tightens his hand on the handle of his overnight bag. It doesn’t feel like an interrogation but he can’t help the faint hysteria that bubbles up in him, the inane thought had in panic that it’s ironic Sakura would threaten to cash in old favors over suppositious harm to his delinquent’s virtue instead of the real hurts he’s caused. “I hope that’s not a problem.”

The look Sakura gives him is measured, appraising. There’s something about him that reminds Goro of Akira: that preternatural calm, that quietly critical regard, that easy way of slipping himself into the spaces between other people’s words. Less force of cosmic nature but some microcosm of one, more candle than guiding star. 

“Just so long as someone’s still picking up your tab,” Sakura says eventually, being the first to look away. “I don’t care who it is, but I can’t raise two kids on a government pension alone.”

  


* * *

  


Appearing less than expert in a thing, even in front of Akira (especially in front of Akira), is galling. That he’s less than expert in a catalogue of things ranging from basic relationship skills to decidedly non-platonic physical intimacy, all in direct relationship to Akira, is--aggravating.

He’s aware on several levels that Akira has more experience in this area. There’s the issue of Ann, for one, but also just the way Akira is: he’s a rogue lodestone exerting magnetic pull over any ferrous object caught within his field, and blood is rich in iron. Other people can’t help but feel _drawn_ to him. Goro contents himself with the knowledge that he’s drawn in just as easily as anyone and tells himself he’s exorcised himself of jealousy long ago.

(Though he is jealous: he needs to acknowledge it, not hide from it. Goro has never learned how to relate to other people in a functioning, healthy way, whereas Akira is capable of that and more besides. Goro has never had an intimate relationship with anyone besides himself, much less with another person, much less a romantic one, and Akira texts his ex-girlfriend with a frequency that would be alarming--could be alarming? Goro has no frame of reference by which to evaluate that--in someone that was less immediately self-aware. Akira sees the way Goro, with careful nonchalance, watches him texting Ann. _Want this week’s horoscope?_ he asks, the curve of his smile flashing teeth to show he’s teasing, turns teasing just as easily into flirting. _Ann said it’s a good week for Geminis and Libras both_.)

Researching it would be stupid. Goro refuses to be the kind of person that googles relationship self-help articles. Doing so, even if no one else were to ever see his search history until long after his death, would be like admitting defeat. What would he even search for? He doubts very much even the most imaginative of columnists would have written about the singular experience of repressing your sexuality in your adolescent years to make it easier to focus on ill-planned revenge. But he has little enough experience with platonic relationships--speak not of the romantic--and Akira is the only person he’s felt a connection to in any meaningful sense, specifics notwithstanding. If what he and Akira were before was _friends_ , how do they act now, as something that’s evolved beyond that?

“Hey.” Akira curls his fingers around Goro’s hands and pulls them away from where they’ve been scrabbling for hasty purchase beneath the fabric of his shirt. The touch, skin to skin, makes sparks strike across the ends of Goro’s nerves, and Akira’s mouth is red and dark from kissing. His breath is coming in sharp, heavy gasps that certainly make Goro feel _something_ , even if he can’t quite define it--lust might be an appropriate word, but it’s inexact; there’s that visceral wanting but also something else besides, something anxious and affectionate in equal measure. But Akira is stopping him, so something must be--not wrong, he tells himself fervently--not _wrong_ , but not quite right.

“Hey,” Akira says again between breaths, catching Goro’s hands and holding them, palm against palm. This must be the fifth time they’ve touched like this--Goro has been keeping count--and he can’t escape or erase how alien it feels, even as much as he wants it. Is trying to welcome it. Is trying not to run from the vulnerability of it. “Goro. Slow down, okay?”

He’s heard those words used in reference to relationships--not general relationships but amorous ones--so he can intuit the meaning, enough so that he keeps his body fixed in place while Akira braces himself against the railing at his back, brushing his hair out of his eyes. Goro is fixed in place, his clockwork gears frozen in their turning. Akira pulls his hands free from Goro’s to curl them gently against the knife lines of Goro’s face. “That’s...that was nice, but--look, we can slow down. Can we? Please?”

The brush of Akira’s thumb across his cheekbone is soft. Goro shudders at the touch, shudders again at the way memories flick themselves _snip-snip-snip_ against the backs of his behind his eyelids. The blood dripping down the back wall of the interrogation room had been more wine red than cherry. Closer to ink than to fruit.

“I don’t know how to do--this,” he warns, one hand gripping Akira’s wrist tight enough to bruise. He hates the ineloquence of the statement. He can’t find a word to summarize all the things in this context he lacks the expertise to do: to be honest, to be vulnerable, to be reciprocal, to be fair, physically or emotionally. He knows something of the somatic mechanics--he’s inexperienced, not stupid--but understanding their practical application is another matter entirely.

He has, perhaps for the first time in his life, something good, and he’s terrified he’s going to do something to shatter it. All he’s ever known to do with good things is shatter them.

“I don’t know how to do any of this,” he says again, cutting Akira off when he opens his mouth to speak. Even that small movement is inviting, with how flushed his lips are. “No, shut up and let me finish. You act as if all of _this_ \--” He jerks a hand through the air in a frustrated knife’s line, trusting Akira to understand his meaning. “--comes naturally to you. It _does_ come naturally to you, which is more insufferable still. You’ve brought me to a place where I’m out of my depth and I can _not_ tolerate being on anything less than equal footing with you. Do you understand me?”

He’s breathing hard by the time he’s finished, something wild clawing at the inside of his throat. He knows it must be showing in his face and doesn’t care; Akira’s seen worse in him and for some wild reason he never took off running away.

Akira just smiles a sly little smile at that, because of course he does. “What?” Goro snaps.

“Nothing.” Akira’s smile widens a little further. “Okay, something. You just look kind of pissed off right now. It’s--a good look on you.”

“ _Akira_.”

Akira laughs and leans in so their noses are brushing, curling his free hand around Goro’s wrist in much gentler reciprocation. It’s hard to make eye contact this close without going cross-eyed, so Goro looks away. “I promise I only look like I know what I’m doing. Faking it until I make it is basically how I get anything done.”

“I hope you know how insufferably perfect that makes you sound,” Goro says snidely.

“Hm. Maybe--though you’re definitely one to talk.” Goro lets the jibe pass and Akira lets go of Goro’s wrist to hook their little fingers together. “Want me to pinkie-swear it?”

Goro rolls his eyes. “What are you, five?”

“What? I make pinky-promises with Futaba all the time.”

“While quaint, bringing up engagements you have with your foster-sister in this specific context is somehow not edifying.”

“Maybe not,” Akira muses, then catches Goro’s eye and smiles again. “But you’re feeling better now, right?”

And--he is. Somehow in the span of that handful of minutes’ inane banter, the gnawing panic that felt too festered to do anything but erupt has quieted down. How does Akira do it, he wonders. How does he see through Goro so easily, how does he always know exactly what to say to draw him back in when he seems on the cliff’s edge, about to plummet away?

Akira tugs on his hand from where their little fingers are still hooked together. “I pinky-swear that I don’t know what I’m doing, and we’ll figure this out together. Didn’t I already say?”

He did say.

The two of them against the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is brought to you by Goro "has the emotional equivalent of a kidney stone and feels so insecure about his relationship with Akira that he goes kind of horndog on main" Akechi. We love 1 (one) absolute fucking dumbass.
> 
> UPDATE: Thank you so much for the incomparable Corvus (impropercorvus) for bringing [a scene in this chapter](https://impropercorvus.tumblr.com/post/190297946756/making-promises-based-on-a-scene-from-this-fic) to life! I never dreamed that someone would one day draw something I wrote, and I am both humbled and flattered by how beautiful your drawing is. Everyone go admire all of their wonderful art and make sure you like _and_ reblog!


	29. Chapter 29

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for how long it took me to update and for how messy this chapter is. I posted it knowing it's messy. My craving for instant validation matters more to me than perfection. I've hit a point in this fic where I need to think more on what I write because it can't just be depression blogging. I appreciate your patience! I have no intention on giving up on this yet. As always, I'll spend the next day and a half rereading and editing this chapter to fix any issues.
> 
> At some point I need to go back and edit past chapters too. At some point. It will happen. Eventually.
> 
> I'm also now on Twitter @existentlqueer

Sometimes Sae misses her old office, political cesspit that it was notwithstanding. You could find quiet there, in a building insulated against the living noise of the city; her desk was still part of a particleboard cubicle but she was working her way up to a corner office furnished with polished mahogany. There was a coffee shop half a block away that sold the best coffee in the city she could find, at least until she'd chanced roundaboutly upon Leblanc in the midst of threatening to press-gang its proprietor. She had no end of overbearing chauvinists that couldn’t stop from offering snide, patronizing suggestions she hurry up and settle down, but at least the air conditioning worked. Fortunately summer has passed and she can open a window and let in the cool air to stifle the heat. Unfortunately it’s raining, and the moisture creeping in with the air makes her shoulders ache.

The no-longer-juvenile delinquent facing her across her desk looks the best he has in years. He's regained some measure of his former polish, in part due to Sae's over-generosity with his budget; if he isn't dressed to the tens he could afford on his father's dime, he's at least somewhere approximating an eight and a half. There’s something a little brighter behind his eyes, even if it’s a sharp-edged sort of brightness; something softer in the keen lines of his face. She still looks at him and sees an argument in human form but he looks, almost, something one step closer to happy. It helps that he has a steady job and positive interaction with other people, but there's certainly more to it than that.

Makoto had told her about Akechi and Akira in the halting way Makoto had when talking about things she wasn't quite sure of, going from telling to confessing. _You don't think it's weird?_ Makoto had finally asked, hands curled around a cup of tea for want of something to hold. _I mean, he did try to...you know._ Makoto isn't one for euphemisms but she tries to keep the peace when at all possible, even when no other involved parties are present. _You know_ is the most economical way she can find to say _murder us_ \--or murder Akira, more specifically. Sometimes Makoto forgets that the rest of the world hasn't lived in her strange shoes, leather-laced and steel-toed boots that have marched through the recesses of the collective human unconscious. She's smart but she's still a teenager, or close enough to one that for Sae it makes no difference. Children don't just stop being children once they hit twenty: Sae is even more acutely aware with each passing day of just how much she's let her sister down.

For her part, Sae resigned weirdness to the dumpster the minute mystical manifestations of the human mind became a part of the equation.

Sae has her own thoughts about Akechi and Akira. She has concerns for both of them. Akira is capable and has enough support that he could get by without her, but she worries what would happen, could happen, if this something doesn't work out for Akechi, fears the ugly downward spiral that would result and wonders how she'd pick up the pieces. That she would try to piece them back together is no doubt: whatever Akechi may be in fact, he's part of the reason she is now who she is, and if she can do well by him then maybe she can make up, in whatever small immeasurable way, how she cast her own righteousness aside.

The concern she feels for Akechi isn't all that different from what she felt the day Makoto came home and told her, unable to meet her gaze, that she and Haru were dating--a maternal sort of apprehension for the way the young can fumble and fall. She's surprised herself with the capacity of her own heart. Several someones set it to right once. She'll never discount a single one of them.

Food was always a thing Akechi had ready words for, starving child starved for attention that he was, so she uses it like a carrot to drag words out of him. He used to leap at the chance for conversation, but most of what came out of his mouth was two half-truths and an outright lie. "I trust you're staying fed," Sae comments, scratching out a line in her notes and scribbling something else in beside it. She knows Ms Kitamura feeds him whenever possible; she and Sae speak weekly.

"Curry," he says after a long pause. "I've mostly had curry this week."

The meaning behind that remark is plainer than daylight. He lifts his chin in haughty defiance, ready to argue against the expected censure. Sae meets his glare with a raised eyebrow, and he jerks his gaze away.

Tokyo is a better place to grow up gay than most of the country, but that's hardly a high bar to clear. Better isn't best. Sae would know.

"Akira knows how to cook more than curry," Sae says dryly, looking back down at her desk but knowing she's hooked his attention--he'll be leaning towards her now, elbows on his knees and staring. She studies her file again and makes another note at the bottom. "You should vary your meals so you don't get sick of them--and it's important to have different sources of nutrition. Just because you've reached legal maturity doesn't mean you've stopped growing."

When she looks up again and catches his eye, she smiles. He sees the teasing there, presses his lips together, and once more looks away.

* * *

> **Goro:** thank you  
>  **Ann:** he speaks!!!  
>  **Ann:** i thought you blocked me lol  
>  **Goro:** don't be obnoxious  
>  **Goro:** i didn't block you  
>  **Goro:** i needed silence and you were unlikely to grace me with that  
>  **Ann:** rude! :(  
>  **Ann:** but also probs not wrong  
>  **Ann:** why are you thanking me?  
> [ _Goro-kun is typing..._ ]  
>  **Goro:** i am...less than expert in social matters  
>  **Goro:** there's little providence given to those who grow up unable to learn these things  
>  **Goro:** your congratulations  
>  **Goro:** i hadn't anticipated it at that moment  
>  **Goro:** but it was appreciated  
>  **Goro:** i just wasn't personally equipped to respond  
>  **Ann:** that's ok! everyone has things they're not so good at  
>  **Ann:** for example: i suck at sticking to a diet  
>  **Goro:** that's hardly comparable  
>  **Ann:** maybe to you! but i don't split hairs  
>  **Ann:** or peas  
>  **Goro:** what?  
>  **Ann:** it's an idiom  
>  **Ann:** nm  
>  **Ann:** the point is  
>  **Ann:** if you insult me or one of my friends or my gf i will come for your life  
>  **Ann:** but otherwise i try to be as patient as i can with other people  
>  **Goro:** how patient is too patient?  
>  **Ann:** you haven't pissed me off yet even tho i can tell you've tried!  
>  **Goro:** is that so?  
>  **Goro:** well then  
>  **Goro:** thank you for your continued patience  
>  **Ann:** (⌒▽⌒)☆

* * *

Sae's father taught her how to make a fist. It's the earliest memory Sae has of him.

_Always place your thumb on the outside, not in_ , he told her, gently rearranging her fingers around one another. _That's right, just like that. You're little, Sae-chan. When you're little, it's better to be quick than to be strong. Remember that._

Sae remembers.

Sae was twenty-five when her father died. You'd think you'd be ready for that milestone by then, but there's no preparing you for burying a parent, much less burying a parent when you're in your prime. Twenty-five is supposed to be about starting your life, not closing someone else's. There are things you don't realize about death until you live them because they're not shown in the pages of books or on the silver screen.

Sae was old enough, so Sae was asked to identify the body. It was him alright, making no mistake. She was old enough, just old enough, to be appointed Makoto's guardian. Who decided that was okay?

_Your mother's gone_ , Dad said to her once. _Eventually I'll be gone too. You have to take care of your sister, Sae. I'll protect the both of you, but if something happens to me, you have to protect her. That's what we do as a family._

So she'd do just that.

It wasn't easy to break into a career in law enforcement as a woman. Anyone who was old enough to matter was old and male and set in his ways. Her father had his small handful of connections, but that could only ever go so far. The men around her, middle-aged and flint-eyed, looked down on her with pity. Sae was determined to carve out a spot for herself and her sister, her sister that she would have to finish raising in her parents' stead.

She lost sight eventually of what it all meant; eventually it was only winning that mattered. At some point Makoto become just another piece in a game Sae didn't realize she was playing, and at some point Makoto woke up.

_I had to protect myself,_ Makoto tells her in those days after Sae sees that she's been out-maneuvered. _That meant protecting you too. Love goes both ways._

* * *

Sae’s next visitor is much less welcome.

“Come in,” she calls at her assistant’s knock on the door. She’d had to hire one last summer when her caseload had become more than she could manage on her own. Sae had been careful to pore over any promising female candidates who applied, young legal students she could offer the mentorship she hadn’t had, determined to carry through her ethos of supporting the younger generation the way she always should have.

"Pardon me," her assistant says, handing Sae a business card and bowing. "The gentleman at the door wouldn't give me his name."

"Not to worry." Sae brushes her hair out of her eyes, setting her work aside. "Send him in."

The gentleman in question is a nondescript man in his middling years wearing a dark suit and not much else to identify him. She casts another eye over the business card and tosses it discretely into the trash. She doesn't need to investigate it to know the information is fake.

"How can I help you?" Sae asks. She folds her hands primly on her desk and meets her guest's eyes.

The other man is just a mouthpiece. Sae knows who he speaks for. "We've had this conversation before," he says, touching a hand to his temple in salute, "and the party I represent respects that. We'd like to open the dialogue for other terms."

Sae's smile is thin ice. "I've given you my terms. Has she read them?"

"Our director's schedule is--"

"That's not what I asked." Sae cuts him off and leans forward on her desk. There's a certain way prosecutors will look at witnesses, a certain air of domineering energy put into the question, and Sae takes all of that and puts it into her response. "My client is protected by attorney-client privilege. Your employer knows that if she approaches him without consulting me, it would be a breach of the law. What I want to know is if she understands that her only way forward is to adhere to my terms: she can only talk to Akechi-kun if I authorize it."

Her visitor finishes his drink and acquiesces by the time he's done.

* * *

Before she leaves, as she always does now, Mifune fetches the soft velvet satchel from her pocket, bids him to shuffle the deck inside and draw three cards. He complies with a click of his tongue and a roll of his eyes, but his rudeness only makes Mifune chuckle.

"This is ridiculous, you know," he tells her, laying each card face-down on the counter while she watches. He can feel Ms Kitamura behind him peering curiously at the counter, can picture her leaning forward elderly nosy interest. "They're just pictures, no matter their symbolism. You know by now I don't believe in things like fate."

"I know, but..." Mifune taps a finger to her chin, smiling thoughtfully. "Akira reminded me that tarot is like telling a story, and the books you recommend have helped me with my clients even though they're fiction. It's about what gets you thinking. And anyway, like I said--pay it back, pay it forward."

"So you say," Goro says, but he draws a card regardless. He sets them all face down and watches Mifune as she flips each one over.

"Six of swords," Mifune says. She knows he's humoring her, so she narrates it aloud. Telling a story, like she said. Trying to convince him, perhaps. "A person on a boat carrying another across the water. The number of swords suggests the two of them are carrying emotional baggage across the water. This card symbolizes something painful in the past, but the path forward is promising. The start of a journey."

Mifune flips the next card and pauses to study Goro.

"What?" he demands. He can feel Ms Kitamura standing behind him, watching in rapt fascination.

"Oh," Mifune says, looking down at the card again. "No, I'm just--I'm surprised to see this one come up in this spread."

"Go on," Goro says testily. Mifune smiles.

"Well, the Fool usually represents the subject of the reading," she says. "Essentially I mean the client. But the Fool can also mean--I don't know how to put this--it's like there's a certain figure affecting fate--"

People believe in this nonsense? "The third card?" Goro asks, hoping to shove all of this away into the background.

The third card shows an image of a hand reaching out to hold a cup overflowing with water. Mifune's gaze darts up to his face again, then down to the card. "The ace of cups represents new loves and new relationships. All together there's a path forward that's--"

Goro feels red heat surging up the back of his neck. "Again," he says, "like I said, this all remains uncredited."

He says that and Mifune keeps staring at him. She looks from him to the cards and back again and trails one small finger across the face of the Fool card. "This is usually about Akira," she says, turning the card around within her hands to study each aspect of its faces. "Akechi-kun, are you and Akira..."

"Akira" Ms Kitamura asks, because of course she does. "That nice young man who was in here before?"

Mifune looks between Goro and Ms Kitamura and back again frantically, her eyes wide. "Oh, he's just, um, he's a mutual client of ours--"

"We're dating." Goro cuts her off. Goro, running on some sort of autopilot and trying not to grasp for air too desperately, cuts her off. "Akira is--he's my--"

_I tried to kill him once_ , Goro finishes for himself internally. Thankfully it didn't stick.

_Akira is my--_

(Thankfully none of it stuck.)

"Oh, is that all?" Ms Kitamura says, humming under her breath. "I thought you were about to tell me about a murder."

Wasn't he?

Wasn't he just?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't ask me how much mental math I had to do to try to figure out Sae's age.
> 
> The tarot spread:
> 
> Six of Swords - beginning of a journey  
> The Fool - Represents both the person the tarot spread is about and also an oblique nod to Akira, whom Chihaya sees in her readings as The Trickster (the Jester/the Fool).  
> Ace of Cups - Love, the start of a relationship.
> 
> Thank you to Krist for helping me put this together!


	30. Chapter 30

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my god I've hit thirty chapters. Every other multichap I've attempted before this has died at two, entirely because of ADHD and not being able to continue it. This is a milestone for me.
> 
> A preface to this chapter: at no point in this fic will any scenes between Akira and Goro involve sexual content, implied or otherwise. This is a hard T-rated fic and very emphatically about slow relationship development. I'm just putting this at this point here because at some point in a future chapter I might end a scene on a suggestive note. Suggestion being that they got tired and fell asleep.
> 
> This chapter does have a short passage in the first scene that ties into Goro's depressive suicidal ideation with a vague nod towards the mentality of an abuse survivor. He's not trying to hurt himself and no one else is trying to hurt him, but I worry it might upset someone and I'm not sure how to tag for it appropriately. If you feel like it would be upsetting or triggering for you to read, please skip the first part. I separate all scenes with line breaks.
> 
> As always, I have no beta, all mistakes and errors are my own, and expect me to make repeated edits over the next few days to correct issues.

Life, by its very nature of being a part of nature, is cyclical. Humanity craves rhythm like the ouraboros swallowing its own tail, familiar breeding comfort as easily as contempt. A hurricane can scatter the pieces of your life out of alignment, and sooner rather than later you find yourself adjusting to the new world order.

It's like that old adage of putting a crustacean in lukewarm water and slowly raising the temperature higher and higher, so that it stays calm while you boil it alive. You can't kill a person with kindness but you can blind them enough with it to distract them from the noose you have around their neck.

And it's not that Goro thinks that Akira would tighten the noose that Goro has around curled like a gold chain around his neck, but he thinks that he would let him if he did. There's something about waking up knowing someone will hold you at day's end, or waking up being held. At some point he realized every facet of his heart bled for Akira; there was room only for indifference and passion, and nothing in between.

It's not a healthy thought, certainly. He is trying. He'll get there--hopefully, eventually. For now he'll curl into warm open half-circle of Akira's body, leaching his warmth, and thank whatever small happenstances that made their lives intersect the way they did.

  


* * *

  


Akira gets back from class to find Goro and Futaba seated across each other in the booth by the stairs playing video games, Futaba on her Switch and Goro on what looks like Futaba's limited edition Animal Crossing 3DSXL. Goro's eyes are on the door the instant it opens. When Akira catches his look and glances curiously at the game, Goro looks momentarily like he's about to snap the thing shut and shove it away before schooling his features into a haughty challenge.

It makes Akira smile.

Sojiro lifts a hand in welcome from his spot behind the counter. "Good, you're back. Watch the store for me. I need to step out."

"I've been here the whole time!" Futaba protests. "I could have spawncamped for you."

She looks annoyed but pleased when Sojiro stops by her to ruffle her hair until he says, "I'll trust you to watch the shop when you stop burning your eggs."

Futaba deflates with a huff. "Well, I never said I'd _cook_ ," she says, making Sojiro chuckle as he walks out the door.

Akira sets his bag on the floor by the stairs so Morgana can scamper out. Food can wait. After school like this, he always needs coffee. He makes one for himself, then one for Goro and Futaba too, and manages to juggle all three in his hands and carry them to the table the way only a bartender can.

Well, half a bartender. But his birthday's coming up soon.

His coffee is a hint shy of scalding, just the way he likes it. He looks up from his mug to find Goro watching him with arched eyebrows, his eyes garnet-bright. "What?"

"Nothing." Goro's smile is a small thing, sharp and sly. He traces the tip of his index finger delicately around the rim of his cup. "That was quite the performance."

"Oh," Akira says, and then, because he hadn't expected it, " _oh_." He presses a thumb to his bottom lip and smiles. He feels stupidly happy. "Yeah? Did you like it?"

"Please," Goro says archly, but there's a smirk in the pinched corner of his mouth. "Don't let it go to your head."

Futaba's boot connects solidly with Akira's knee, making him jerk back with a _thunk_. " _Ow!_ "

"Find somewhere else to flirt!" Futaba doesn't look up from where her Switch is carefully shielding her face. "Listening to you two is just _gross._ "

When Goro blushes it's the back of his neck that flushes red, followed, if Akira's very lucky, by the tips of his ears. "We're not--" he protests even though, yeah, they very much kind of just were.

The sound of their bickering is what greets Sojiro when he returns.

  


* * *

  


"I have a test on Friday," Akira says by way of an apology. "I might be up kind of late. If it bothers you, I can study downstairs."

"It's fine," Goro says from where he's seated at the edge of Akira's bed, looking down at the way his pale bare feet contrast against the dark wood of the attic floor. "I've slept through worse."

It's the wrong thing to say; he can tell from the way Akira doesn't quite wince. A shadow of a wince. It's so well-hidden he wonders if anyone else would notice. He hopes not. He wants, selfishly, to be the only person that notices those things Akira tries to hide. "I can just work from my desk light. That way the overhead night doesn't have to be on."

"That's fine," Goro says again. He gets up to tug the chain for the attic light, casting the attic into darkness. As he's shuffling back to the bed Akira's shadow looms up between him; he catches Goro before he can fall when they stumble into one another. " _Fuck_."

"Sorry," Akira says, his arms curling neatly around the thin lines of Goro's hips. "I just wanted to say good night."

Goro huffs. "Say it before I shut the light off," he says, "not when we're both blind in the dark."

"Maybe I like being blind in the dark with you." The way Akira says it makes something warm curl in his belly.

"You have to study."

"Yeah." Akira leans in until their noses bump together, then feels his way from there how to fit their mouths together and kisses him, long and slow. At the press of Akira's tongue to his lips he opens his mouth and lets him in, kissing back harder, with just the barest hint of teeth scraping across the top of Akira's tongue.

Akira sucks in a breath and pulls away. The only sounds in the attic are the faint, ever-present hum of electricity and both their heavy panting. Goro's eyes have adjusted enough to the spill of city lights through the attic window that he can make out the blurry shapes of Akira's face in the dark; the streetlight catches the rods and cones in the turbid medium of his left eye, throwing his pupil into shadow deeper than a black hole.

"I need to study." Akira's voice is thick; he swallows and tries again, so considerate, so careful to explain. "Test. Friday."

"Right." Goro tries to ignore the way his skin tingles and to not let the disappointment creep into his voice. He didn't do anything wrong: reality is just inconvenient.

Akira leans in and kisses him one last time, softly, at that familiar point just below his eye. "Test Friday," he repeats quietly, his mouth tracing the words against Goro's skin and making the atoms shiver in his wake. His breath is a ghost whisper over Goro's ear. "But maybe this weekend...?"

He trails off. They break apart. Goro's heart races as he crawls in bed and directs his mind to sleep.

  


* * *

  


Goro has always been a light sleeper. He'd needed to be, first to know when to discretely slip away from the tiny apartment he and his mother shared, and then in the group homes, where boys bullied other boys for sport. It's a habit he's never been able to shake himself of, so when Akira finally slips into bed it tugs him from the sea of sleep back up into wakefulness.

Akira sees Goro stir. "Sorry. I didn't mean to wake you."

"It's fine." Goro draws back on himself, the better to give Akira space to settle in. Keeps himself drawn back once Akira settles.

Whoever said old habits die hard wasn't wrong.

Akira doesn't let that deter him, only touches a hand to Goro's hip and curls an arm around his waist when Goro doesn't pull away. "Missed you," Akira says.

"Stupid." There's no bite to it. He doesn't really mean it. He just doesn't understand how to respond to this expression. What does it mean to miss someone when you're both together. "I was right here."

Goro can't make out Akira's face this time, in the shadows and the gloom. The comforter adds too much shade to the picture. He feels him instead of sees him, feels the way Akira leans close and kisses him again, for what must be the hundredth time that night.

_Oh_ , Goro thinks. Suddenly he understands.

"You were," Akira agrees, smiling against Goro's mouth. "And now I am too."

He falls asleep so easily, curled against Goro like that, and there's nothing for it but for Goro to fall to sleep too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No specific notes I can think of for this chapter other than: a relationship is not going to fix you if you're broken or a mess, even as much as I wish it would.
> 
> I think one of the issues I've been running into is reconnecting to the plot threads I had laid out before I got to the big confession chapters. I've started rereading Shrike to try to settle back into that. This isn't the first time I've done that, but. Wow. Most of this fic is _messy_. At some points I find myself asking what the hell I was trying to convey, because I don't even understand it. Boy I really do need to go back and edit at some point. I'll let you know if I start to do so.
> 
> I do feel like I've grown so much as a writer from this project. That's only thanks to everyone who's read with it and engaged with it and made me feel encouraged to keep going.
> 
> I know that as a fic writer I don't have an obligation to updating in a timely or consistent matter, but that doesn't mean I don't wish I could plug this fic full of frequent updates! I know what it's like to be a reader as much as a writer. I really appreciate your patience with me and I always always always always _always_ appreciate every single comment I get.


	31. Chapter 31

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for your patience these past few months. The pandemic has really not been......kind at all to my mental health. I think that's been a big part of my roadblock. We live in tough times.
> 
> Remember to be kind always

_I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating._

* * *

  
There's a bruise on Goro's collarbone, a low dark shadow. He presses an idle finger to it and feels the way his skin pulses under his finger in response. He's always been something of a masochist; when he was younger he would bite his nails to the quick, tug out the loose hangnails on the edges and watch blood bead up around his nailbed. This, at least, is a good hurt, a sweet hurt. Goro presses down on the bruise again. No mistaking what it is, but at least it's low enough to hide below his shirt collar.

Leblanc's tiny bathroom is in as much raggedy disrepair as the attic above it, the small space lit only by a single swinging square lightbulb. Goro studies himself in the bathroom mirror and catalogs how much he's changed. There's a hollower set around his eyes than he remembers from his youth, casting dark circles, and a tight pinch to his mouth. He finds himself gritting his teeth and deliberately unclenches them. His hair is no more dull but it is reaching a shade too long. He needs a haircut and considers asking whether that's one of the many talents in Akira's arsenal.

A knock on the bathroom door. "Don't stay in there all day, kid," comes Sakura's caustic voice. "Customers need a place to take a leak too."

With a little sigh, Goro shakes himself out of his stupor and finishes combing his hair. How inconvenient that the only bathroom they have to use in this little cafe is the selfsame cafe's only public restroom. The sudden thought occurs to him that he might invite Akira to spend the night to his apartment instead, a thought that brings anxiety in its wake. Leblanc has always been simply and only Leblanc; staying over here feels somehow less transgressive than inviting Akira to spend the night with him.

Maybe because Leblanc is the closest thing he's ever felt like having a home. But, in the end, you have to start somewhere, yes?

The cafe is empty when he steps out of the bathroom, sans its proprietor and his formerly-shutin daughter. Sakura catches sight of Goro and wordlessly doles out a plateful of curry for him for breakfast, an act that makes Goro feel nauseous and heartened in equal measure.

Sakura catches whatever look on Goro's face that gives away any hint of what he's feeling. "I'm not letting you starve on my watch," he grumbles, holding the plate out. Goro takes it with murmured thanks and, after a beat, goes to join Futaba at her table.

Not that he wants to sit with her. Not that he's trying to be kind. But. If he doesn't, she'll needle him relentlessly.

"Yo, Light Yagami." Futaba doesn't look up from her book, a dense academic text on astrophysics. "Finally up from your beauty sleep. Akira's been gone for like....three hours."

Goro sniffs haughtily. "His schedule doesn't dictate mine."

"No duh." Futaba rolls her eyes and returns to her book. They spend their time like that--Goro eating, Futaba reading, and Sakura's fingers itching for a cigarette he won't light--in companionable silence.

Eventually Goro's phone goes off. A message from Sae--a reminder, and a not-so-gentle inquiry, about the question of college. Goro huffs out a breath.

"What's up?"

When Goro looks up Futaba is studying him over the top of her book, her clear eyes meeting his for once without flinching. She looks genuinely concerned. That makes his skin crawl--though it shouldn't--but he knows why. Her concern feels wrong. Misplaced. Misdirected.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. You don't get to decide how someone else should or shouldn't feel.

Goro swallows around the sharp metallic taste in his mouth and ventures an explanation, all too aware of the way Sakura is watching them. Watching carefully and listening even moreso.

"Sae-san is very insistent I go back to school," he begins.

When he doesn't continue, Futaba prompts him: "......Ooooooooookay?"

"I don't," he says, then falters. It feels--indelicate. To put this explanation on her of all people. But there's a challenge in her gaze he can't combat against, so he continues. "I don't see the point," he says, altogether too much full of rage.

So of course, then, it all comes out.

"I am hardly equipped to become a productive member of society. The entire concept is a joke. Society is trash. The idea of wanting to contribute to propagating something so ridden with malignancy is trash. What do I do, become a salaryman for some rich conglomerate and let them work me to death? No matter what the Phantom Thieves did, the world doesn't just change overnight. Fuck this."

He stops himself abruptly, breathing hard and fast. From zero to vitriol in ten seconds flat. Will he ever unlearn this tendency towards rage?

Should he?

"You're not wrong," Futaba says, "but you are stupid."

Goro's head snaps up so he can glare at her, acutely aware as he is of Sakura's presence on the other side of the bar. "What is that supposed to mean?"

"So the system doesn't work. So what." Futaba waves a dismissive hand in the air. "Then you just ignore it. Sae wants you to go to college. You think a career path is stupid. Great, I'm with you, let's talk about anarchism next time. But what about knowledge for knowledge's sake?"

What about knowledge for knowledge's sake?

It's so--simple. Elementary. Baseless. Idealistic.

Why hadn't he thought of that before?

What _about_ knowledge for knowledge's sake?

Most people go into life with a plan. Get rich, or die trying. Find the right man, the right woman, whatever, or die drying. Goro Akechi had a plan once, half-baked like many of his plans have turned out to be. He's never cared about getting rich. He thinks, maybe, he could be on the right track with finding the right man. Maybe.

But not have a plan for the rest of it? Why not? Why _not_. It's unrighteous of the world to expect children to make adult decisions. Why can't he just figure it out as he goes along?

"Knowledge for knowledge's sake," Goro says, meeting Futaba's worried eyes. When their gazes lock she hurries to look away.

That's fine. He can work with that.

"Well, you know," she mumbles, tugging at her hair and awkward now that they've reached some kind of accord. "Something-something like that."  
  


* * *

_  
I am. I am, I exist, I think, therefore I am; I am because I think, why do I think? I don't want to think any more, I am because I think that I don't want to be, I think that I...because...  
_

* * *

  
Nationals come and nationals go. Shiho's team wins, because of course they do. Ann is keyed up with anxiety through the entire game and breaks into tears when the score is called. They wait for Shiho outside the locker room; when she comes out Ann throws her arms over her shoulders and kisses her on the cheek. Akira smiles, turning away to give them privacy.

He loved Ann once. He loves her still, the way a dandelion love the sun. He loves her the same way he loves Ryuji, and Makoto, and Yusuke, and Futaba, and Haru. But there are different kinds of love. It's not quite the same. None of it is the same.

There's love, and love, and love, and then there's being in love.

He's happy that he and Ann have both found the latter.

> **Akira:** we just got Shiho. I'll meet you at Shibya Central in 20  
>  **Goro:** Did they win?  
>  **Akira:** of course :)  
>  **Akira:** knew they were gonna  
>  **Akira:** Shiho's seriously good and the team's won nationals 7 times in the last 10 years  
>  **Akira:** Ann just has anxiety  
>  **Goro:** she seems like the type to fret needlessly  
>  **Akira:** she cares easily  
>  **Goro:** Sounds like someone else I know  
>  **Akira:** :)  
>  **Akira:** you sure you're up for this?  
>  **Goro:** I said I was, didn't I?  
>  **Goro:** I hate redundant questions  
>  **Goro:** I'll see you in twenty

Akira rereads the conversation again then locks his phone. Behind him, Ann and Shiho's voices have died down, their conversation a murmur: he can hear Ann trying to hiccup quietly and Shiho giggling.

"That was Goro," Akira says, giving them a moment before turning back to face them. Ann has a hand pressed to her chest as if she can hold the hiccups back by sheer martial force, and Shiho is deftly working her fingers through a knot in Ann's hair. Ann raises her eyebrows at him.

Akira raises his eyebrows right back.

"Everything good?" Ann asks.

"Sure. I'm gonna go meet him at the station. See you back at the restaurant."

Akira ducks his head in a temporary farewell and walks away. Halfway around the corner Shiho catches up with him, stopping him with a slim hand hooked around his elbow. She draws back the moment Akira stops, always conscientious of contact with other people.

There's no one behind her, no slim young woman with wavy golden hair and too much feeling to keep contained. "Where's Ann?"

"She's talking to the team. I only came to say thank you."

Shiho is twenty years old, the same age Akira will be in just a couple of weeks, the same age as most of the rest of Akira's friends. She's a few centimeters taller than she was when they were in school together, no less slim but more toned with muscle. More than that, there's a confidence to her that Akira never saw in that one year he was first in Tokyo: she knows the space her dimensions fill up and she won't apologize for it anymore.

She never had anything to apologize for to begin with: it was the rest of the world that owed that to her.

"Thank you," Shiho says again, "for everything. Not just for me, but for Ann too. I don't think I've ever said."

Akira smiles back at her. "Just because something isn't said doesn't mean it isn't understood. Some things, you just know."

* * *

_  
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does._

_It is up to you to give life meaning.  
_

* * *

  
People are expected to have goals. A purpose. _Les raisons d'êtres_.

Historical philosophers, in their often faith-driven way, held that one's function was predetermined--scripted, if you will, by some unseen heavenly father in the sky. The preponderance of religious drivel in pre-Enlightenment thought has always been something of an intellectual canker sore. Capitalism may be a blight upon society but at least it brought with it the idea that some lonely, bereft individual could break the chains binding them down.

Goro has only ever had one true, real goal, which will remain forever unrealized: you can't make the living apologize to the dead no matter how hard you try.

Well. You can. But dead ears can't hear, and it's the hearing that matters.

What he's living for now is nothing less than the bottom half of Maslow's pyramid but he is, maybe, starting to want more. Basic needs met, he'd hungered unknowingly for intimacy; intimacy found, his greed inches towards want of fulfillment. The question of the future is suddenly a tangible one he has to grapple with.

The truth the wide majority of historical philosophers missed is that life can, and often does, exist without purpose. People toil their way through menial labor, wither away in fruitless relationships, join their lives in unfulfilling marriages, give birth to ungrateful children. It happens to everyone. It happens all the time. Purpose isn't a matter of what one does but what one feels driven to do.

Existence precedes essence, after all, and finding that essence is the most difficult thing a person can do.  
  


* * *

_  
I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar.  
  
_

* * *

_  
I am going to outlive myself._

_I am going to outlive ------._

_I am going to ---live ------._

_I -- ----- -- ---live ------._

_I--_

_\--live._

I live.

_I live._

I live.

_I will live.  
_

I will live

_I will live_

(and I will)

_(and I will)_

I will live

_I will live._

I will live.

I _will_ live.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter happened in large part to the Crash Course channel on YouTube, which has a series specifically dedicated to philosophy. Their episodes on identity (and specifically existentialism and Sartre) helped ground a lot of what I knew I wanted to express.
> 
> Right-justified quotes this chapter are pretty much all from Sartre *chef's kiss Crash Course Philosophy*.


End file.
